Show Notes - Episode 7 - February 9, 2020

The coronavirus is generating worldwide headlines and striking fear into the hearts of many. What does that mean for the jiu-jitsu, wrestling, MMA and combat sports community? At what point would the coronavirus start discouraging a lot of combat sports athletes and practitioners from going to training and swapping sweat with strangers on the mats?  

At the moment, there are relatively few cases of coronavirus in fight-producer powerhouses such as the U.S., Brazil, Russia, Australia and Canada. But what if the coronavirus spread to 500 people in your community, or infected thousands of people near you... would that scare you so much that you might avoid martial arts training for weeks or even months? Even if you did train amid multiplying coronavirus cases, what modifications would you make to your training and/or post-training routines?  

In episode 7 of Everyman BJJ, we discuss the threat of the coronavirus to grapplers and the larger concerns of staying safe on the mats – particularly as it pertains to cultivating good hygiene habits and doing our best to prevent skin and staph infections.  

The Everyman BJJ crew explores how many grapplers and fighters train five or six days a week, on mats that – even at gyms that clean them often – even the cleanest mats during an intense practice session can become cesspools of fungi, bacteria, viruses and pathogens. And yet elite grapplers and fighters tend to be far healthier than the Average Joe or Jane. Elite grapplers tend to get sick a lot less than most people, despite often being intimately exposed to lots of bacteria, fungi, sweat, abrasions, cuts and even other people’s blood on occasion. What is going on there? If being exposed to viruses, pathogens, flu, fungi and bacteria is supposed to increase our risk of getting sick, then why aren’t more elite combat sports athletes sick all of the time?  

Everyman BJJ’s Noah Green has been playfully dubbed “The Shaquille O’Neal of Sweating in BJJ Circles.” Noah is a burly, intellectual Neanderthal, so he sweats A LOT and also happens to be a hygiene fanatic who moonlights as part of the Staph Police at his academy. Noah shares his G-rated Anthony Bourdain standing-in-line-to-get-a-shower story and how, during a recent jits training session, Noah watched in horror as a drop of his sweat fell in super slow-motion and landed squarely in the eye of his training partner.  

In terms of staph and skin infection risk, is gi or no-gi training safer for the athlete’s skin? We offer our perspective (based on anecdotes and experience, not science). We also recount training in rooms so hot that the walls sweat, too! Jordan Wirth and Frank Forza recall the many days of “Slip-and-slide" training and days where athletes (either knowingly or unknowingly) trained with teammates who had a skin infection such as ringworm and lived to tell about it.  

We ponder how Andrew Yang, a little-known candidate for U.S. President, publicly made a comment to the effect of, ‘Police Officers should be purple belts.” The Everyman BJJ crew offers their take on that idea and Frank also tells the story of how former UFC owners Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta flew to Louisiana nearly two decades ago and had the vision, the instincts – independent of scientific data – to see the sport’s potential and how big it could become.  

Join us in watching this lively episode and, if you like what you’re seeing, please like and share our videos on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. 

Everyman BJJ shoots new videos every Sunday — catch us live-streaming conversations every Sunday at 1:30 pm Pacific Standard Time/4:30 EST. 

Email questions, comments and compliments to: [email protected]