then the last thing i'm never gonna forget the last thing they said they said to me is like can you move any part of your the right body of your body can you move that leg at all in my mind i took everything and i went like and my my leg just twitched and then i just remembered the doctor saying put them out put them out boom i was out next thing you know i wake up in the hospital like literally like wake up in the hospital bed and my family's all around me and i'm looking around and i'm like oh [ __ ] oh my god i survived and then i started down like well okay i got the disability insurance policy [Music] this is the recovery after stroke podcast with bill gasiamas helping you navigate recovery after stroke hello and welcome to recovery after stroke a podcast full of answers advice and practical tools for stroke survivors to help you take back your life after a stroke and build a stronger future i'm your host three-time stroke survivor bill gasiamas after my own life was turned upside down and i went from being an active father to being stuck in hospital i knew if i wanted to get back to the life i loved before my recovery was up to me after years of researching and discovering i learnt how to heal my brain and rebuild a healthier and happier life than i ever dreamed possible and now i've made it my mission to empower other stroke survivors like you to recover faster achieve your goals and take back the freedom you deserve if you enjoy this episode and want more resources accessible training and hands-on support check out my recovery after stroke coaching membership created especially for stroke survivors and caregivers this is your clear pathway to transform your symptoms reduce your anxiety and navigate your journey to recovery with confidence head to recoveryafterstroke.com to find out more after this podcast but for now let's dive right into today's show this is episode 175 and my guest today is chris martin who is a brazilian jiu jitsu enthusiast and coach who experienced an ischemic stroke due to repeated traumas to the carotid artery sustained in the spore while he was being choked and strangled by his opponents now chris is on a mission to raise awareness in the bjj community about the risks of the sport but more importantly is interested in raising awareness about how to spot the signs of stroke and how to take action fast if you suspect someone at a brazilian jujitsu event or bjj event may be showing the signs of stroke since this is a stroke prevention interview please share it far and wide if you have been meaning to share an episode of the podcast and haven't got around to it yet this is the one to share whether you are listening on a podcast app or watching on youtube there has never been a better episode to share it would mean so much to me and it might just help save a life thank you chris martin welcome to the podcast thank you how are you man i am doing well i really appreciate you reaching out because this topic that we're going to talk about today is something that's really close to my heart and something that i've worried about since my own stroke and since learning about dissections in arteries but before we get into that part of it tell me a little bit about what happened to you i think the best way to summarize it um is a lack of awareness in what i do and first um my hobby is what we're going to talk about today brazilian jiu jitsu and i'm very passionate about it um i i found it in 2008 at a time in my life where i needed it and it did change my life in many ways and i'm not going to go down that rabbit hole however for the general listener i want them to understand what brazilian jiu jitsu is is a martial art that is used the best way i can describe describe it is to use the least energy and exertion to manage your um your output and put the end goal in a combative situation using brazilian jiu jitsu is to get to the back and finish finish with a strangle in the sport the misconception is you hear the word chokeholds but in the medical field chokes and strangles are two different things what we do is we try to strangle our friends as quick as we can and um [Music] they tap out when they feel like there's no way that they can get out of the strangle and if they feel like um they're gonna maybe pass out go to sleep and they usually my friends are pretty crazy and they will wait as long as they can until they almost go to sleep or they might go to sleep many of them and we do this to each other about six to seven days a week sometimes twice a day and when you say strangling what you're actually doing is you're placing pressure with either with your arms with your legs onto the neck and that impacts the uh vertebral or the um uh the carotid arteries and decreases the blood flow to the brain so they have no choice but to go limp and and yup and they go and and we we the more we do this as brazilian jiu jitsu practitioners who are very passionate about this we find even sneakier and sneakier and more efficient ways to apply pressure to the vertebrals and the carotids sometimes we wear these fancy outfits that looks like pajamas they're called and they have long straps that we can pull our pull out it would look like a karate kimono however we use it to wrap around each other's necks it has collars we use to hold the collars pull strangle apply pressure at the same time as we're putting knees in the back of the vertebrals we're ripping bow and arrow chokes we're pulling materials around the person's neck i should have wore a ghee i could go get one if i need to but you get the picture um and it's um it's a relatively fast growing sport because of how addictive and how healthy it is from the standpoint of mental health and physical health um so it is who i am as somebody who fell in love with brazilian jiu jitsu in a time in my life where i needed something from a mental standpoint and a physical standpoint um i was not in a good place in my life at 28 years old and i'm 43 now and i have not stopped uh doing what i love however um in 2017 um it was during a periodic uh two months of pretty heavy strangling with uh uh my friends uh working on um specific chokes to the back uh making our chokes more efficient and um one day in practice i was caught in a strangle and again like like i said we have the opportunity to either tap or go to sleep or in my case just keep fighting out of it to try to find a way out because in brazilian jiu jitsu the mindset has always been there's always a way out and that's what helps develop your character because you learn to over overcome adversity through brazilian jiu jitsu through being strangled and putting yourself in very bad positions that are very uncomfortable and you do it again and again and again and it makes you more of a humble human being um and that's the beauty of jiu jitsu however that day in august of 2017 um i i uh i did not um tap out uh and i was very unaware that i was that the strangles that i had accumulated over the years could potentially cause a little bit of damage trauma to my carotid arteries um i and uh over time i had some a little bit of a tear from on my left carotid artery and um i did have some signs i learned after i had the stroke because i missed the signs um because of the lack of awareness in the sport um and it's nobody's fault it just is what it is um and i had i didn't tap out however my partner let go of me when he felt my body just limb and i just remember the the room spinning i was on my back i couldn't communicate no words were coming out of my mouth long story short it was a full ischemic stroke the clot was on my neck was very large it had been sitting there for some time i had not given it time to heal and that day the uh torque of the north-south choke applied by my uh teammate rob um shot the clot to my brain which immediately caused an ischemic stroke uh the the medical team at freighter in milwaukee wisconsin administrated the tpa they were able to get me to the hospital within an hour they had the tpa shot to the brain saved my life and um here i am on stroke to recovery podcast and um or and uh you're still recovering you know to this day however during that time um what happened to me that day didn't make sense and while i was in the hospital it didn't make sense and when i was out the month after it didn't make sense and it put me on a path of research and understanding and through that journey i did receive a phone call right after this happened um uh because i was on a uh article came out about it on jiu jitsu uh jiu jitsu times and then immediately i got a phone call from somebody who was very interested and he was a former military person um and he was very interested because he had been doing parachuting in the military and he was he had like double carotid artery dissection which caused strokes both sides and he was like trying to get back into martial arts but he just wasn't sure if it was a good idea and he was he was he was telling me how rare this this whole thing is and he said you need to he said he goes you need to document what you're doing and i said okay i'm like so i'm like i started writing um and then just putting up little blogs and then people started reaching out to me in the martial art community who've also it happened to them and i started interviewing them to learn more about their cases i would ask can i can i um record it so i can always reference it because i'm not gonna remember anything in this interview um and um they most of them all agreed yes so during my time of healing and recovery i was able to talk to other other survivors and through that conversation i learned about what happened to them and how it happened and did you have signs did you do this and then i started documenting on a spreadsheet and then um let's put it this way um over the past four years and now here we are uh the spreadsheet i stopped counting after over a hundred and so it's not as rare as we think however it's very on uh people are very uneducated there's no protocols there's some gems that are just completely brushing it under the rug there's some gyms that have had multiple people in the same gym have strokes and the instructors still are brushing it under the rug and so um the hard part for that is that each person who has their stroke has their stroke they have their story in their head it was they look at themselves as a number this is me but the difference that i see in in what happened and then they go about their daily daily lives and it's just that that and but what happens is i get the call from every single one of them and then i uh form a relationship with them and i talk to them and then i even get the bad ones too the ones from the widows the ones from that are still in the wheelchair the ones that are still in the hospital fighting you know and these are these are these are people who were on these are jujitsu people they're different and um no different than you know they're they're passionate about what they do it's just it takes a physical person uh it takes somebody who is it's okay to get your ass kicked type of thing and come over and over and over again like these aren't weak-minded people these are very very strong-minded people they do not like they don't not like to lose they've never messed with stroke that's the issue and stroke will get the better of a lot of people that are very strong willed i think the beauty of jiu jitsu is it does create a great foundation for overcoming serious adversity in life and the skills can be transferred to stroke recovery right and what's interesting is my son who's 25 now started bjj probably about three or four years ago after it gained popularity because of mixed martial arts and ufc and he's given me the whole idea for my mental health spiel as well and it's really interesting that the the lessons that he's able to obtain about calmness thinking not overreacting and not not breathing inappropriately and focusing on your the mind and body connection has really shifted this guy who in in our modern world was quick to becoming a statistic of anxiety and maybe even depression or something like that so the camaraderie that he has there with the people that he trains with so i see the major upside to a sport like bjj and then as somebody who's experienced three hemorrhagic strokes and i'm into my 10th year of recovery and i've met hundreds of stroke survivors and widows and the bad ones the ones that are still you know struggling to get back to some kind of version of life that resembles normality which they never do most of us have a different version of what normal is um i hate to discourage my son about bjj i hate to say to him listen don't go down this path because of this issue and as kids what they used to do my son and his brothers they used to choke each other and smash each other and felt each other and and for me it was like don't touch each other's heads and don't touch each other's throats do not do that because you can damage arteries and you can cause strokes and you can cause long-lasting effects so please don't do that now the other thing i'm concerned about is is that he might be involved in an incident where he creates a situation for somebody else that ends with them being hospitalized because of a carotid artery of verbal artery dissection and then a stroke right and it's like there is there is definitely more that needs to be done i'm glad you reached out i'm not glad that you had a stroke and i'm not glad that it's happening but the fact that you've taken this stance where most people sweep it under the carpet i think it's really fabulous because it's a problem around the world and in australia the amount of people that my son goes to bjj with that are his age and older and younger but of course they're all his mates so there's probably about 10 of them that i know and then there's other people that are my age in the early 40s and 50s that are going to bjj i just started and i would imagine that they are completely unaware of this situation as well right so i could reach out right now to at least 15 people that i know personally that go to bjj and i wonder if they know anybody who's had a stroke or not due to a sports injury and then i wonder if they know how it's been dealt with and how that person's is now and whether they've managed to come back to bjj or they gave it up completely i imagine that most people who have an injury because of a sport like that would go enough i'm not coming back to that sport i think most would but the just jumping back into you know what i said before is that this this is what has changed my life so i i i use this comparison every time i think i just see it the most it's if if a surfer goes into the ocean and he goes surfing and he gets bit by a shark but that's everything that was his passion that's his lifestyle like he wakes up in the morning he has his coconut juice you know what i mean he's taking skateboards down with his long border he's got his everything the sun is good like everything's great and then he he gets attacked by a shark and and but he lives and it was the scariest moment of his life and but he wrecked but he recognizes you know he recognizes the signs you know that was a you know a night after the storm you know what i mean and that's when the sharks are out or it's a low tide you know now he's aware of it and instead of ignoring and just jumping in and pretending like it would never happen to him or it or just not even thinking about it is but it's something that he loves will he go back i would think that the surfer is going to go back in the water but he's just going to go back in differently and that's how i've re-entered the waters from my perspective yeah so tell me about what you had to recover from so you're in a you're in a um you're rolling with one of your competitors um friends and you end up going limp and and then you're out and then it's not good so tell me a little bit about what happened after that and then we'll talk about what you had to overcome so i i didn't go out um it was it was just you're looking around and you're trying to sit up my whole right side of the body was completely pit like just limp so my my i couldn't move so i was trying to get up and if it was the room was kind of spinning around and it felt like it was just like like slow motion and um it was kind of like like and um i was trying to communicate like to my they're all rolling around me all my teammates and they thought they thought i was just kind of you know lightheaded and it was just you know he was just about to go out you know because that happens sometimes you get light-headed sometimes if you don't tap right away um and that's kind of how it felt it kind of felt like i was kind of in that corner got that corridor between being put to sleep and not but i was like living in the middle somehow and it just wasn't wearing off if that makes sense but um the hard part was just not knowing what was happening to me you know when it happened um you have no control of your right side of your body you cannot speak you you know what you want to say but the words can't come out and you're trying to communicate and and and you just can't and the brain is not functioning um and luckily after about five minutes they realize something's not right with this guy and they called my fortunate situation is that i live in um we're here and this happened in oak creek wisconsin and freighter is in wauwatosa wisconsin which is during the middle of the day like whatever time it was um it was midday sometime it only took you know half hour to get there but some of these other stroke survivors they don't and it's the reason i say some places are going to know how to deal with what's happening here on a higher level and they're going to have the right equipment and they're going to have the right doctors and they're going to have the right experience and other places might not have access to that because we don't have cutting edge hot like oak creek isn't like close to milwaukee milwaukee's like that's like a big city like chicago's the big city next to us but like every state's got their like big city you know and that's where the good hospitals and doctors and everything are that's that's basically where it happened to me so i was fortunate the whole ride in the ambulance i didn't know what was going on i didn't know what was happening to me all i was doing was focusing on my breathing so you know going back to what you said learning to be calm under pressure just i was like like four months basically and like just trying like i didn't know i'm like just telling myself you know just just relax your body let them take care of you relax your body and then you're i you're you're thinking about your kids you're thinking about your life insurance policies um that's all going through your head you're coming to terms with things you're you're just you know um and then i just remember once they got me into that emergency room they were asking me questions if you've had a stroke and you're in recovery you'll know what a scary and confusing time it can be you're likely to have a lot of questions going through your mind like how long will it take to recover will i actually recover what things should i avoid in case i make matters worse doctors will explain things but obviously you've never had a stroke before you probably don't know what questions to ask if this is you you may be missing out on doing things that could help speed up your recovery if you're finding yourself in that situation stop worrying and head to recovery after stroke dot com where you can download a guide that will help you it's called seven questions to ask your doctor about your stroke these seven questions are the ones bill wished he'd asked when he was recovering from a stroke they'll not only help you better understand your condition and they'll help you take a more active role in your recovery head to the website now recovery after stroke dot com and download the guide it's free [Music] and the last thing i'm never gonna forget the last thing they said they said to me is like can you move any part of your the right body of your body can you move that leg at all in my mind i took everything and i'm going like and my my leg just twitched and then i just remembered the doctor saying put them out put them out boom i was out next thing you know i wake up in the hospital like literally like wake up in the hospital bed and my family's all around me and i'm looking around and i'm like oh [ __ ] oh my god i survived and then i started down like well okay i got the disability insurance policy i mean that's what you have i've been doing insurance for 20 years so this is all i think about is insurance so but that's what i was thinking about and then i i couldn't speak you know they were i was trying to like they were holding up you know things like chair you know like i was trying to say the words i understood everything they were saying i could read you know what i mean but i couldn't communicate yeah and then i just didn't really have any um feeling in my right hand and then from there it was like basically just how did this like laying in the hospital next couple days what happened this does not make any sense what's the stroke like i couldn't even like i didn't know what was going on the whole time there i didn't know was going on and then i got and then i got home i still didn't know what was going on i still didn't know like i was so naive and ignorant about strokes and i i mean right when i went got out of the hospital after a dissection with the i have a stint in my neck now they after i went back to the doctor they said this the the clot was so big we had to stint it because you need to lay low and blah blah blah see back in the day when people told me to lay low you know doctors you just go and whatever i'm not gonna lay low i two days after i get out of the hospital i'm trying to go to planet fitness to try to lift weights yeah i i mean that's how uneducated i was and then i realized that night like i'm like i was on like i was like trying to like lift this is not happening like i'm like seriously like looking back i'm like you got to be kidding me like i was i couldn't i could have had another stroke the clot was still there and i'm in planet fitness throwing around weights because i'm trying to get back to jiu-jitsu's shape cause i'm pissed off that something like this would set me back completely ignorant completely ignorant and now aft like i said i had the conversation with the guy and then he like told me to start documenting and then i started getting serious about it and i started having all these conversations and i'm like oh my god this is some serious stuff yeah man it's so serious that you know the reality is is the world stroke organization says that one in four people will have a stroke in their lifetime man how they have the stroke varies a lot there's so many different ways to have one right most of the strokes are preventable they say about 90 of them are preventable caused by mostly um our the way we eat smoking drinking drugs you know all the all the vices that people tend to have and most of them are self-inflicted just like heart disease and cancers and all that kind of stuff right and then and then there's these unfortunate situations where somebody's driving a car they have a minor collision and they get a bit of whiplash and that causes a carotid artery dissection or a vertebral artery dissection and i've interviewed heaps of people that are recovering from that right and the the situation is is if if one in four people are going to have a stroke in their lifetime and the united states has what 300 million people a lot of people men that is 80 million people or more at some point we'll have a stroke right so the situation is so critical and i started talking about stroke in 2013 after my uh first two brain hemorrhages in 2012 and i was going to community uh events and talking about the prevention of stroke what is it how to recognize the science what to do if somebody is having a stroke okay the fast basically the fast message right face arms speech time and then i'm still doing those presentations and it's been nearly ten years since i started doing them maybe nine years next year and not much has changed not many people have an awareness of hey somebody having had a stroke and if they do they don't pay enough attention to go what happened to them usually it's associated with older people and it's not associated from collisions from a car from whiplash it's not associated from sports or any of that stuff but in australia i'm not sure if you're aware of the sports of the sport cricket but we had one of our much loved australian cricket players get hit in the neck by a cricket ball at a pretty rapid pace which is like a baseball and he was hit in one of the carotid arteries he fell and died on the spot that he was here immediately because of a massive tear in in one of his carotid arteries and he bled to death in his neck so even then there wasn't much done by the cricket community to raise awareness beyond making a massive headline on tv and throughout the country and probably the quicker playing world where this person had played which would have been england maybe pakistan india sri lanka all those countries where cricket's popular new zealand but there wasn't really any more said about the actual cause of the of the of the death which was that the artery was damaged and that's not uncommon and it's possibly um something that can be prevented by neck gear being worn now this guy wore headgear and his head is protected to about his neck similar to what baseball players wear when they're facing the pitcher but beneath there there isn't any protection because you imagine in a sport like that it would be quite um maybe it might get in the way of the way they play the game and it might be a little bit uh difficult to handle and the the lack of times that that has happened in a in such a large event where it made news all over the place the amount of times that that's happened that are still rare but there hasn't been really a move towards making it safer for somebody around their neck on the on the side of their body that's facing the bowler um so so i'm staggered this is why i started the podcast i'm staggered by the lack of awareness the podcast was about me meeting other people so that i could feel better about myself and here i am 175 or so episodes in and not much has changed then i'm not expecting it to change like that overnight i think we've got a long job to do but then here we go here's some bloke that i normally would have nothing to do with from the other side of the planet reaching out to me and says man we need to raise awareness about stroking bjj and automatically what i'm thinking is you know at the bjj conference that happens annually all over the world i'm thinking wouldn't it be great for somebody to get up and go to that event and say hey guys let me tell you about stroke what happened to me my story what happened to all the other people who i've interviewed and let me tell you about what to do if somebody you think on the mat is having a stroke what are the signs how do we get them help how do we take action fast and possibly save their life and minimize the damage yeah so i completely agree with you the the hard part about that is from what i've experienced so far is finding you know those organizations that do get all the coaches under the one tent all at the same time i did uh hacks hats off to um the bjj mental podcast uh mental coach podcast uh gustavo dantas uh he's in scottsdale arizona and two years ago he did put on a uh he hosted the coaches seminar he tried to get as many coaches in arizona to come and they it was a number of different speakers um one person spoke about mental health one person spoke about uh ptsd one person spoke about um and so it was it was one of those types of you know value add and how do we make our gyms better what do we do better as a community for brazilian jiu jitsu and how do we make it safer for our participants gustavo don just put that on now i don't know how many coaches um there are probably x amount of schools you know nowadays there's you know in every city and every state in united states there's a couple jiu jitsu gyms so that means there's a lot of coaches i would guess there's probably a couple hundred coaches in in um arizona um gustavo was able to get probably 25 of them which was a great step you know but that's still 175 that you haven't touched um and then you know that just leaves it at that day um so it is a good start however what i feel like at where we are are at a more critical point um what i heard you say is that you are very aware that you know traumatic car accidents are what causes a lot of the tv role in the carotid dissections and that's that's the the blunt or the excessive force so i i i have an article um it was a 2019 case study in the journal of uh vascular ultrasound uh journal and it was written by five uh authors uh michelle steppman is listed first so stetman and five others uh put together uh this case study and um to summarize it yeah and i'll just say um the discussion is blunt trauma and it says quote unquote following major trauma such as motor vehicle crashes um aggressive screening using computed ctas have been recommended so when there is so the reason i'm saying telling you this is because from my case studies many healthy jiu jitsu practitioners who have had dissections have been misdiagnosed and sent home um and they have not had the right screenings done to them and so later on because they did not recognize the signs later on through activity or or day-to-day it caused the stroke later on so it was a misdiagnosis the reason i'm telling you that um is because this article goes on to talk about uh the different strokes or i'm sorry the different the different chokes and again they they're continuing to call these and jiu-jitsu strokes but these are really strangles because the choke is when you have something going down your passageway and you're choking i can't breathe we're not choking each other we're not sticking our fingers down each other's throats we're we're compressing the carotid arteries in the vertebral arteries to constrict blood flow to the brain as quickly and as efficiently as possible and um through that compression um is is causing what what this article um is saying is uh um it's it's it is the equivalent to motor vehicle crashes some of these uh strangles the one that they talk about is the guillotine they call it the guillotine drop type maneuver appears to have the same kinetic force that being involved in a high-speed rear-end motor vehicle crash also does so the eotena's i grab under your neck i wrap under either just my my other hand or i come under your shoulder and then i i press down on your head throw my legs around your back and pull you to the ground uh cranking the neck and back and at the same time restricting the blood flow on both carotid arteries um this article um all goes on to say that studies well this this article was written because what they're saying is that because of the increase in mixed martial arts um this this was a case study they did on a former marine drill sergeant and he was in the marine corps teaching combatives and um marine corps and uh he uh he had a carotid artery dissection following a guillotine choke so they said that um um oh part of the marine corps close combative training involved teaching and demonstrating chokeholds which for several years this 46 year old man offered himself up as a practice model um one one of these chokes was the guillotine choke or or guillotine drop and that's the one that they go on to say in the in the article that um it's it's it's about the same amount of pressure as as um a high speed uh rear end so and that the reason i'm saying this is because that blunt force from that um motor vehicle crash that when you go into the er and you tell them that happens then they can figure it out and then they do the proper scans which usually are ctas if if they try to do a cat scan or an mri without contrast they are not going to find the dissection and then if they send that person home they're probably going to they could have a stroke later on that's the danger okay so all we need to do is get the message out there we need to get people to start recognizing what a stroke looks like and then when they're taking that person to get them assistance and get help explain that they were being choked and at the same time a bigger pattern they were being strangled and at the same time uh that they may have a dissection in one of their vertebral or arteries therefore treat it as a collision of a vehicle right aggressively treat it and um so a a success story that i've recently had was an email from a gentleman who had a carotid artery dissection they took him into the er they explained it to the doctors what he was doing the doc the doctors aren't all gonna be like oh yeah jiu jitsu i know exactly what that is like it's kind of a new thing however he he sent me a thank you letter because the doctor went in on google after listening to what these people said his training partners he googled and um you know whatever he found the the the article that's ranking right now is gonna be if you type in like chokes um strokes from chokes and jiu jitsu or chokes and you know whatever keywords you want you know um the bjj asia bjj asia did a article just ripping my article saying hey chris martin here's his research these are what you gotta look for like this with like what doctors need to look for these are the screenings so i've documented everything and i put it out there the best that i can like you type in like strokes and jiu jitsu you should be finding some chris martin articles um i've i put out as much stuff as i can and the good news is is that you're right that's what they should do and and then the doctors need to treat it accordingly this article the reason it's very um the reason it's very interesting to me is that the fact that they go on to say that you know this is somebody this marine corps um combatives instructor had been you know doing this for many years has has taken trauma they did so uh they did when they brought him in they used a dus um it's uh it's a um what do you call these things um uh duplex ultrasound have you ever heard of it no yeah so this duplex all ultrasound is a screening tool that they're saying can detect if there's something funky in the carotid arteries or the vertebral arteries instead of going in and doing a cta every time they're saying maybe this is um a medical device that we could use um and so what the um they show here i'm looking at you know a clean you know what a clean uh looks like and then what this this guy's look like um and you can clearly see an ultrasound the the blue the blockage around like it's not as clean there's there's there's some um it says elevated velocities in the distal common carotid artery consistent with a high grade lesion you know what i mean so um what i believe is that um most people are not aware this exists um i'm still learning i mean i'm learning on a daily basis and it's been four years so you know going back to tuesday you know it's been 10 years where where are we going with this man time flies and uh and i'm learning on a daily basis like even just learning about this new screening tool um and and and and learn reading this case study this is new to me but it just shows and then with my i've got over 100 cases that i've documented i've worked with a a doctor who put together a case study with some of the data that i've collected we're waiting to get that published it's just basically a case study that shows hey here here are a number of people this is what they prevented uh presented this is what it was just kind of making the community aware like there's a sport that exists it's called brazilian jiu jitsu and this is what they're doing and really what this article sums it up the best by you know stepman she says you know it's you know these guys these guys and girls were practicing this the physician need to be aware that there's there's some there's blunt there's hard trauma on these necks they're not thinking about it like that but because of that they're saying uh these athletes could could uh benefit from some early detection from using a tool like this yeah and so i i i'm doing i'm doing more research on these myself um i might buy one for myself just to have it at my house um just to check my carotid arteries why not and you know it's funny um and and and i it's it's here the reason that it doesn't exist that the awareness is not there is because we don't want to we don't want to think about this it's not something that we want to think about and uh nobody wants to take the time to think about something that's not going to happen to them i wouldn't want to take any time to think about something that's not going to happen to me so eventually what's going to have to happen if you want my personal opinion is that similar to safety protocols that in the united states if you have a factory you have employees if you have employees you have rules that you have to follow for the safety of those employees and then there's governing organizations such as osha they call it and they have training manuals and instructions and posters that need to be put up and waivers that need to be filled out to bring awareness to the safety issues uh inside the workplace and i don't see that brazilian jiu jitsu should be any different i think that to get the proper insurance i think you should have to go through these types of training every instructor should not have an option to attend the annual conflict conference the instructors should be again if they want this insurance for their gym they're going to have to you know uh go through the the the safety protocols and bring awareness and have the training to understand the signs not give them an option because none of them are going to take the time to do it yeah you know what there's um there's a legal nightmare waiting to explode on somebody who comes across a client or you know somebody who's attending their gym is not made aware of the risks and then ends up injured and then decides to take legal action and sue that organization i reckon it's a legal legal nightmare about to happen for somebody um what's interesting is the um international bjj federation you know on their website i'm looking at it now european it covers the european jujutsu federation it comes as the pain jiu-jitsu federation and a whole bunch of other federations or organizations um have an anti-doping uh policy you know and they have an anti-doping uh section on their website um the there is a there is a known condition that happens to lumberjacks okay which is carotid artery dissections and vertebral artery dissections because when they're cutting down trees and they're looking down and then they want to see where the tree is about to fall and looking up wow it is causing repetitive trauma to those arteries and it's causing um ischemic strokes so there's an awareness in that community and perhaps they don't really talk about it to this extent but maybe there is some some version of understanding of recognizing the signs of it because i imagine over the hundreds of years that people have been cutting trees down that they would have come across this very many times so it is early days for bjj as a serious sport that has evolved or emerged from brazil where the two founders are world renowned and now it's starting to be it started to take off because of ufc and because of mixed martial arts so there would have to be some kind of movement at in in the you know this this is kind of the ground swell i'm feeling but then it'll have to accelerate at some point and i think it'll accelerate by you doing what you're doing uh us putting out content about it i want to prevent stroke but i feel like the the least help available for stroke survivors is after they come home so what happens after i come home there's no support there but of course i would rather not have a show because that meant that there was no stroke survivors well no that's that's that's the goal right there because yeah here's the thing in jiu jitsu see most that that one in four stat i believe if you break that down and you throw everybody in a bucket you know most of those people are on the older end it's more of a lifestyle induced stroke and the jiu jitsu community is more of a health capitalist fitness um and still mental health as well they they um they're a different stat you know what i mean so the [Music] what you know and going back to um you know making this a priority you know to uh bring awareness to people i don't think that it's fair that people are going into it without knowing but again i'm also going to say this you can't fault the brazilian jiu jitsu community for not knowing so it's you know we're really in this you know and and and and nobody here is i am not here to you know stop obviously i'm still training myself you know i created a lifestyle you know however um there there there does you know there does have to be some some awareness to you know what we're doing to each other and what i what i do know is this so i'm sorry if you you know don't have a show anymore because everybody because we do come you know we've you and i come together and we figure out the magic formula and and we've we've healed everybody um but in jiu jitsu it really can this stroke is the worst case scenario because the dissection is sadly enough it's probably happening more than we know because it's not being diagnosed because it's very hard to diagnose and so and it's and again it's nobody's gonna run a ct a cta scan on somebody who just has some minor you know dizziness or dehydration type or just doesn't feel right unless they unless there's a reason you know and so some of the people i've spoken to who have had those collisions and then had a stroke as a result of a dissection uh it happened many many months later sometimes 6 12 24 months later and the dissection um wasn't maybe that dramatic at the beginning but over time and further movements and and further trauma then it becomes larger and larger and then eventually the dissection becomes big enough where it either falls off and that is what causes the cl the blockage or because of the blood flow and what you mentioned earlier in that article the the increased rate of blood flow where the narrowing happens it changes the way that the blood travels and it creates a high pressure and a low pressure system behind the dissection and that is what creates the clot sometimes the clock gets stuck there and doesn't dislodge for a long long time and then it moves after another trauma or another movement or something that dislodges it right so you're right it's it's difficult to link the two because the person who experiences the the stroke might not happen when they've been to bjj it might happen two years after they've stopped going to bjj and they're wondering you know how did this happen to me but the the major trauma happened when they were at bjj perhaps right so yeah yeah and what's interesting is you know with these emerging sports you know nfl in the united states and afl in australia um are really starting to take seriously cte you know chronic traumatic and collapsing encephalopathy which is the uh multiple collisions of the heads against head and the concussions that happen and what that's doing to um to to players and sending them into fits of uh anger depression rage um and some of them are are causing serious harm to the community and to their loved ones and to themselves before they end up killing themselves right so it started to become a a serious thing now but it's taken so many decades if you imagine about how long um how long the nfl has been around and how long afl has been around in australia that's nearly a hundred years or more and and and it's only now starting to be taken seriously and that's because i think there was not enough reach the people like you and i that were doing the kind of work that you're doing didn't have these platforms of podcasts youtube social media to share and they weren't able to raise awareness that fast and they weren't able to be taken seriously because there was a lot of money at stake imagine now if the nfl was in a position where they had to alter their sports to avoid collisions of the head it would be a completely different sport and this is another underlying issue right so bjj yeah you know imagine being a brilliant jiu jitsu uh spectator and then going to bjj and not seeing people getting strangled i mean it's what's interesting what's interesting about that though and and you're right so you know the fun you know that's there's there's kind of like you know you got you got different ways to submit the person and a lot of times it's arm arm locks joint locks of like you know a wrist a wrist lock an arm lock uh what's really popular these days they're knee knee locks ankle locks um um and so that that's a lot of that's a lot of opportunities to right there that i so the head's only one of many um the head to be honest is the funnest part you know the strangle is the fun part uh that's probably just our primitive nature of you know you know that strangle and when you do it with the ghee and you really get fancy with wrapping that thing around people's necks um and from different angles and upside down and you know you're basically upside down wrapping geez around people's necks and arms and that's that's what we consider fun and it really is it's a puzzle um however um what's what i'm trying to say is this what's interesting though is if you look at the evolution um of the police force i train a couple i do some private lessons with some um milwaukee police officers and uh they we just we just go we just do combative type um um and i show them everything that they can do and and basically they just can't touch the neck and the head so they you know it's still fun to grapple with these guys you know we're you know going at it and doing different you know different you know moves pulls you know takedowns like you can still control people and have fun i'm not saying that um that that's what where we need to go however again um even in this in this paper here um it says that the marines uh themselves have their own protocols that they the marine corps recommends that training chokeholds and related maneuvers should not be at full force and never more than five seconds duration during training in this case what happened to this guy the patient had subjected himself to repeated exposures over several years as part of his task as a trainer which is what i was doing you know a lot of us trainers are um are allowing uh you know hey you know you let me let me you you're not you're having a problem with that choke do it on me let me feel it let me feel it oh that's not tight enough you need to adjust a little bit more here no more torque you got to turn your back here get underneath my crank that you know and so that's you know looking back there was a lot of trauma to my neck and so um you know and then once once you had so much trauma that the clot started growing and growing and growing and and so um that's you know so i'm just fascinated by this article that there could be something out there called a duplex ultrasound that could be something that i could just go around with my training partners and if if we do recognize that there is some type of some type of uh scar or uh it's a lesion is what it is yeah um we could say you'll see that the speed of the blood flow in the lesion so tell me about you then man is is your neck and your head out of bounds these days i mean so uh oh out of bounds like no i i i it's not i mean i've been playing i i've been playing with fire probably i i it's out of bounds from a what this guy was doing letting people hey i don't get i don't do that i don't do that in practice we don't i don't let people do it on me so like when we're that's and that's the other thing people others understand what the danger is what we have for each other is that in traditional jiu-jitsu practice we're choking each other back and forth in practice you know for half an hour before we go into combative training so we're like working the chokes with each other to make to tighten up our chokes and so over time that creates trauma over to the same spots so it's like if you think about the same spot you know that you know because that's just how like where your hands go on the key or where their hands go on the deck so you're working the same spot so i don't let people do that to me and if we're practicing chokes that day i were i would go and join another two people and i'll be the third person i unfortunately i have a stint in my neck and i don't i don't know the random ramifications of that thing break i don't know i don't want to find out um however in training i they they do attack my neck some some of them do um some of them maybe maybe don't go like i i have a coach who's more advanced than me we roll with each other he doesn't he doesn't attack my neck um he attacked me in other ways the ramifications are huge man if the stint gets damaged and and then it causes uh a clot then then it's an issue then it could cause another stroke need to be removed and replaced etc so um i'm not here to tell you what to do but i'm just you know just sort of saying what i understand about it right which is that the ramifications are huge you've all we've already spoken about it at length what the ramifications are damage to a carotid artery a stent is in a similar situation now the the the fact that you reached out to me suggests to me that you're on a bit of a crusade you want to uh no let me let me rephrase it's not a crusade you're you're on a a campaign to raise awareness because that's definitely not what you're on right and you're are you getting traction are you struggling to get traction i'm getting horrible traction i'm getting wonderful emails from wonderful people like one get one guy every couple every every couple months you know telling me this is great and and telling me and telling me to you know keep my head up and keep doing what you're doing kid you're you're you know it's it's gonna pay off and you're doing and really encouraging things um i had the conversation with you know the the you know spouse of somebody who's died had the conversation of the you know sister sister-in-law who's you know you know her sister her sister's husband died you know doing jiu jitsu crazy story about that is she's telling me she's like you know we just hit his head this one's one story was really bad um and you know you hear all the stories and this one like sounded like there was blood involved mine didn't have blood involved this gentleman didn't make it and um what's very interesting about the story is that he didn't make it and then like the family was kind of like you know what happened you know they couldn't come at terms and then the crazy thing is it's like a couple weeks after his death you know the family was trying to come to terms with and and a book showed up on the doorstep that he must have ordered you know before he passed and the book was called the art of strangles yeah it is an art and i understand the the combative nature of it and why especially men do it now i i'm not a female and i don't know any women in the sport so that's why i'm not commenting on their behalf right but i know why men do because i know why my son does it i know why my mates participate in bjj they all talk about the positive impact that it has on their self-confidence on their ability to overcome challenges on their ability to transform their personal lives by using the skills and and and um and applying them to regular life it's definitely kept a lot of the people that i know who do it out of anxiety and depression and for the people that are listening to this and thinking my god these guys uh say that they choke their friends um this is something that people do as comrades they do it as as as people who are collaborating to teach each other how to get better at um dealing with adversity in life and then that is transformational in in the rest of their lives they're not doing it to hurt each other although people do get hurt it's about actually um in growth and overcoming and becoming better versions of themselves and that's just one small little piece of it because i believe the bigger piece is the coming together and getting better as a community as a brotherhood as a sisterhood it's almost like it's it's almost it almost feels like a fraternity like this is like these nip these these relationships that are built inside these these where people are going to battle with each other together every single day and then taking that out and going to competitions and fighting others it it's it's it's a tribe it's a it's a it's more than a fraternity it's more it's more than a family it's an absolute it's a full-on tribe that you don't get anywhere else so to have that taken away from you do you think most people walk away from this sport no they don't these crazy people they don't they keep doing it because it's that's how strong it is all i'm saying is the the crusade that i'm on is a awareness crusade it is and it's this it's you just have to bring this to the table to your people who are stepping on the mats and let them know this is something that can happen that's all you have to say if this happens then x y z here are the protocols listen you don't even have to talk about it just put it on the wall and and and so if it does happen we have the protocols of what like like you said make sure when you when you you don't put the guy in the car he doesn't drive he or she doesn't drive by themselves you drive them or you call an ambulance if x y z when you get there this is what you say you tell them you do this you know these are the scans that we typically we've had success you know finding these clots um and and you know so you know just having that safety protocol is gonna it's gonna save lives a hundred percent because again you can't go on the mat and just not know that this is gonna happen it's so going back to my surfer thing it's like a surfer going and surfing in a lake you know a freshwater lake that's how it is that's well it's it's let's just say there's some fancy waves or like a water park you know they got the artificial waves you know there's any sharks in there yeah you're surfing then you find out they're sharks you know what i mean yeah so it's kind of like it caught catches you by surprise that's what i'm saying it shouldn't catch us by surprise like if we know the signs so the good news is is that i have a number of case studies of people who have found that they had a dissection they treated it by staying off the mats and getting better at healing and then not having a stroke well there you go so there there's the win for the team so now if everybody can kind of but this guy was like a logical dude like when he got home like he did the research and then he found my articles he said oh maybe i have a dissection and then he took himself to the doctor and said doc i think i might have a dissection here's why this is what we do then they did the right tasks and then they found it and then sure [ __ ] it took six months but he said he said it went from whatever size to basically gone in six months so basically he just had to stay off the mats but if he would have done what i did which is just keep going on the mats and training every day then i had a stroke he didn't so he wins but i'm glad i helped him win i feel good i'm a coach for doing that and that's that's basically that's the crusade i'm on it's just hey guys it's here treat it accordingly that's it yeah know the risks i love it um that's it absolutely love it so chris where can people find out a little bit more about you and um the work that you're doing yeah so i'm kind of all over the place obviously if you haven't figured it out through my interview but um the hashtag that you can kind of find me at is biz jitsu which is b i z j i t s u biz jitsu so that's like my instagram um i believe my youtube channel i have a medium blog medium.com and that's also biz jitsu is gonna be the the username for that as well so um any of those you know my youtube i have um you'll find uh different interviews many of the interviews are posted um so if people are looking for like uh they want to hear a story about a like-minded like what the science symptoms were for that that student they can hear it there my medium blog um is going to have all my protocols and interviews and just kind of stories you can kind of follow my story over the course of the years through my interviews um and uh if you just go onto google and you type in you know jiu jitsu strokes from jiu jitsu or strokes and bjj from chokes you're gonna just get bombarded with probably some of my articles i don't know what maybe it's just my seo but i i believe that's how people are finding me so okay what i'll do is i'll post all of the uh links to all of your socials and your website to the show notes so anybody who wants to get that can basically go to recoveryafterstroke.com episodes and they'll be able to pick through all of the episodes at the very top or near the top after you've heard this episode will be the chris martin interview and then from there you'll be able to click on that and see all the different uh links to the website and his socials and his youtube and hopefully what we can do is share the crap out of this episode and put it in front of as many people as possible so that we can assist in raising awareness because my podcast is called recovery after stroke but of course i'd rather my podcast didn't exist and never existed because that meant i never had a stroke and nobody else that i know on this podcast has had a stroke so um let's see if we can uh support you in that journey that you're on i really appreciate you doing it it's very rare that you find people who have taken on the preventative side of the stroke journey and i think that i think that you will 100 save lives and you will make people get diagnosed sooner which will impact their stroke recovery and hopefully make it shorter and then you know it'll have families recover sooner and people have their dads and their mums for longer and and their kids for longer and that's all that we want to do isn't it there's no need for us to just lose people unnecessarily to this situation especially during especially doing what we love and and you know what we think is healthy you know to not know and then to come home and to lose somebody or to lose your your your loss of daily daily living skills um is you know doing what you love is is not it's it's it's you know yeah thanks so much for being on the podcast thank you i appreciate it thank you for what you do and um thank you to all the listeners as well who are helping us and helping you spread the awareness as well so thank you importantly we present many podcasts designed to give you an insight and understanding into the experiences of other individuals opinions and treatment protocols discussed during any podcast are the individual's own experience and we do not necessarily share the same opinion nor do we recommend any treatment protocol discussed all content on this website and any linked blog podcast or video material controlled this website or content is created and produced for informational purposes only and is largely based on the personal experience of bill gasiamas the content is intended to complement your medical treatment and support healing it is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health advice the information is general and may not be suitable for your personal injuries circumstances or health objectives do not use our content as a standalone resource to diagnose treat cure or prevent any disease for therapeutic purposes or as a substitute for the advice of a health professional never delay seeking advice or disregard the advice of a medical professional your doctor or your rehabilitation program based on our content if you have any questions or concerns about your health or medical condition please seek guidance from a doctor or other medical professional if you are experiencing a health emergency or think you might be call triple zero if in australia or your local emergency number immediately for emergency assistance or go to the nearest hospital emergency department medical information changes constantly while we aim to provide current quality information in our content we do not provide any guarantees and assume no legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy currency or completeness of the content if you choose to rely on any information within our content you do so solely at your own risk we are careful with links we provide however third-party links from our website are followed at your own risk and we are not responsible for any information you find there
