Prevalence and Profile of Musculoskeletal Injuries in High-Performance Professional Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Athletes

Abstract

Background Brazilian Jiu-jitsu (BJJ) has become popular over the past years; however, few studies investigated the prevalence of injuries in this martial art modality. Objective The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of musculoskeletal injuries in BJJ competitors along with their profile and characteristics. Methods One-hundred fifteen athletes were included in this cross-sectional study. A hundred fifteen professional high-performance athletes were selected from twenty-five BJJ gyms in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. Descriptive analyses were used to demonstrate the athlete’s individual characteristics, and the Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric test was used to assess the significant differences between the number of injuries categorized by athlete’s belt or performance level category. Additionally, the Fisher’s exact test was used to assess possible differences between frequency of total injuries and injuries per affected site among the belts. Results We observed an injury prevalence of 85.2%, in which knee (32.6%), shoulder (11.2%) and elbow (8.4%) were the most affected regions. We did not find any significant differences between the number of injuries and belt classification (p=0.093) or for the frequency of total injuries per anatomical region among belt classification (p=0.121). Most injuries occurred during training (74%), and the main reason for time loss from training activities was due to trauma (70%). Conclusions There is a high prevalence of injuries among BJJ competitors, and the most affected site was the knee.