Unclean! Unclean!

The contents of your average fighter’s medicine cabinet

People of a sensitive disposition, stop reading now. This blog is about disease, in all it’s crusty, itchy, pustuous glory.

If you’re a pundit, ardent observer or casual fan, you’ll all have heard of the dreaded ‘staph’. The skin infection that has blighted our sport over the last two years has had plenty of press.

Forrest Griffin appeared on YouTube looking like a walking corpse with a bloated knee, courtesy of staph. Din Thomas got it on The Ultimate Fighter 4 and almost got sent home. Nick Diaz was recently hospitalised for it. The Miletich gym had an outbreak that took out a few of it’s fighters.

Skin infections are nasty, but unfortunately, par for the course with what we do. If you do MMA or BJJ, you’re exposing yourself to a shitload of bacteria, just dying to find an open pore or cut it can start infecting. I’ve had staph. I’ve also had impetigo. Neither were any fun.

I was lucky. I was one of two people who caught staph in my gym at the same time before we blitzed the mats clean. In the space of a week, I developed a spot in an open pore on my forearm that swelled up to the size of a pea. It hurt to squeeze (Forrest Griffin shouted at me when I squeezed it in front of him), and no head would come out. It was staph.

The tiniest staph scar (highlighted) you’re ever likely to see, in the middle of the coolest tattoo you’re ever likely to see

The other guy at my gym wasn’t so lucky. He developed an egg-sized cyst on his lower leg that had to be removed by surgery. It took 24 hours to develop.

Maybe I’m lucky and I’ve got a strong constitution. Maybe he’s a pansy who breaks out in a rash at the sight of dirt. Either way, we both got it, and we were both out of action for a while until we could get rid of it.

It took me a week of oral antibiotics to get rid of mine. Then I went to Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas, and caught it again, in exactly the same spot. Balls. Another week of antibiotic cream shifted the bastard. Great gym, but next time I roll at Randy’s, I’m doing so in a hermetically-sealed wetsuit.

There are various schools of thought on how to deal with germs on the mat. Many gyms bleach their mats with strong cleaners after almost every session. Some gyms never clean their mats, with people walking on the mat in their shoes, spitting and snotting all over the place.

The gym I train at falls in between the two. We clean our mats maybe once a year. Certain people (no names mentioned) have been known to tread on the mat in their outdoor shoes, and blood that is spilled is often wiped up with a bit of toilet paper. Nice.

But I subscribe to the theory that less washing means that you develop tolerance to the bacteria that lives on your mat. In most gyms, you’ve almost always got someone who is out with some kind of worm, rash, pox or whatever (we refer to them as having the AIDS. “How’s your face-AIDS coming on?” “Have you shifted your leg-AIDS yet?”)

Almost no-one gets skin infections in our gym. Those that do usually pick them up elsewhere, having trained at another club somewhere. Some guys have contracted it from rolling around with their dogs. Yes, animals carry that shit too. But the regular guys on the mat day in day out, well we’ve all built up our tolerance levels to the stuff that lives in the gaps between the mats where pubes go to die.

If you want to stay clear of skin infections, keep it simple. Wash your kit. Wash your hands before training. Wash your entire body after training. And wash your kit!

Now go train, and if you start to itch, don’t worry, it’ll just be the AIDS.