“It’s 2024 and it’s still a big issue” - Mikey Musumeci slams dangerous grapplers who injure training partners

ONE flyweight submission grappling world champion Mikey Musumeci is back at it again with his scathing albeit eye-opening "Mikey Rants" on Instagram. In this issue, the otherwise mild-mannered 'Darth Rigatoni' showed his teeth a little by slamming jiu-jitsu athletes who injure their training partners in the gym.

Here's the video of the rant:

In the video, Musumeci said:

"One of the biggest issues I hear from people is getting injured in training. Now, obviously, jiu-jitsu is a contact sport and in any contact sport, there will be injuries. But what I'm referring to are those people who explode on submissions. This is unacceptable yet it's so common still that people are getting injured like this. So let's discuss why this happens in training"

He continued with:

"Typically there are two reasons why people get injured in training with submissions. The first reason, your ego is so bad that you will do anything to win that roll, even when you injure your training partners. Then you can go home and celebrate."

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Mikey Musumeci drives home his point on why injuring your training partners is unacceptable in jiu-jitsu

After pointing out that recklessly going all-out and hard on your training partners all the time is motivated by your ego, Mikey Musumeci drove his point home by revealing what he believes is the second reason why such injuries happen in the gym:

"The second reason, you lack technique. There's two parts of a submission I always tell people: The first part is your positional control. The second part are your mechanics. In order to have proper mechanics, you need to have enough time to control the submission."

Musumeci continued:

"So in training, what you're practicing is keeping control of the submission. So then, if you have that training partner that won't tap to submissions - either because their ego is bad or they don't know that they're in a submission, you have enough time to make that awkward eye contact with them to tell them 'I have it, tap.'"

Musumeci has a solid point here. In the training room, you're there to train and learn, but not necessarily to hurt anybody. It's not a fight - it's practice. Also, it's quite obvious that if you injure your training partners, you won't have anyone to train with. Hence, it's detrimental to your progress as well.