Can You Prevent Leg Breaks from Leg Kicks? w/Kevin Ross | Joe Rogan

Oh, you're very welcome. It's very cool. People, I'll let you know, Kevin brought a giant heavy bag filled with sand that has to weigh north of 200 pounds. Oh yeah. I think it's about 250. Yeah. It was a lot of fun getting that in my car by myself. Is that your preferred method for conditioning your shins? For sure. For sure. You know, the thing with shin conditioning, a lot of people do, you know, they smack themselves in the shin with bottles and kind of stupid things like that. But you're not really creating what you need to, which is overall conditioning, overall strengthening of the bone. All you're really doing is deadening little spots in your nerves, but that's the worst thing you can do without strengthening your bones. So you're deadening the nerves, but not strengthening the bone overall. And if you're not doing that, you're going to think your bone's a lot stronger than it is, but it can't handle the impact. So with a sandbag, you're covering much more surface area and applying it in a realistic situation where you're able to throw kicks repeatedly at this thing. And what you really want to do is do it to a degree that it's causing a certain amount of pain, but you're able to do this daily with repetition because that's how you continually develop just like getting stronger at anything. It doesn't happen overnight. You got to just do this every day, just at the end of your session, knock out a few kicks, and then again tomorrow and again the next day, and you slowly and steadily are able to go harder and harder and develop the strength and conditioning in your shins. Trevor Burrus So the idea is that you're making like these little tiny microfractures, right? John Blauwelch Yeah, for sure. And yeah, like I said, you want to be able to cover a good surface area, so you're hitting it all at once as opposed to little spots, which is what happens when you just whack it with a bat or something like that. Trevor Burrus My experience with whacking it with a bat is everybody kind of quits. You're like, hey, I'm going to condition my shins, and then they just go, what the fuck am I doing? And they stop doing it. John Blauwelch Well, the thing too with when you're able to kick like that is you can kind of slowly build up. You start a little bit lightly and develop a little bit stronger, and you kind of create a little bit of a crease. And as you get going, your brain can kind of wrap itself around it a little bit better, and then you start going harder and harder, and by the end of your five, ten minute session, you're putting some serious weight into that, and you're not noticing it as much. Trevor Burrus Yeah, we were talking about your knee that you had a fracture in your knee that you didn't realize you had. John Blauwelch Yeah. Trevor Burrus And that's weird. Like the thing that disturbs me maybe the most in kickboxing, and so I've only seen it a few times is when someone checks a kick and their leg snaps in half, like Tyrone Spong when he fought Gokan Saki, or Anderson Silva when he fought Chris Weidman, same thing. That snap of when the shin gives out, like that. Can you prevent that from doing this? John Blauwelch Obviously, it's one of those just freak things that happens. You know, clearly with those guys, you can have the most conditioned shins in the world, but you catch them the wrong way at the wrong time. It can happen, and it's rare, but it does happen, and it doesn't really matter how long you've been doing this, how strong your shins are. Sometimes things just break. Trevor Burrus I always wonder how many guys have little breaks and they don't know about it too. John Blauwelch Probably a lot. Trevor Burrus Yeah. John Blauwelch Yeah. They said that's what happened with Anderson. John Blauwelch Uh-huh. Trevor Burrus That Anderson threw a kick, and he broke it before that. John Blauwelch Yeah. Trevor Burrus Like he felt something was wrong, and then we threw that second kick, and it snapped in half. That's why it did that. John Blauwelch Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. It's just the one that tends to do that. Trevor Burrus Yeah. It's a shin on shin contact is such a brutal thing. I think everybody should experience it once. John Blauwelch Yeah. Yeah. And you know the funny thing is, it doesn't matter how long you've done this for you. We watch these fights and assume that they don't feel pain and that it doesn't bother them, but even guys with hundreds and hundreds of fights, you see them the next day and they're gimping around pretty good. Trevor Burrus Yeah. John Blauwelch You know, we have this idea in our brains that eventually you're going to get to a point when you just don't feel pain and it doesn't bother you, but eventually you realize that never happens. You know, it is better to get that out of your head now. You know, Muay Thai and kickboxing and anything that's bone on bone is it's going to be painful and that's part of the art of it. You learn how to place your kicks better and pay attention to what you're doing and yeah, of course you develop your shin conditioning and that kind of thing, but it always hurts. It's always going to hurt.