- Tom Callos
- Jan 21
- 10 min read
Let's face it: As martial artists, we embrace activities that ask a lot from our bodies.
Chances are, you know someone who’s asked a little too much from his or her hips and, consequently, is suffering hip pain. Maybe you know someone who’s already undergone surgery to deal with the problem.
It’s for martial artists like you that Black Belt assigned me this article.
It explores the hip health stories of some prominent practitioners and explores the options for preserving and, if necessary, restoring your hip functionality.
WARNING SIGNS
For many martial artists, it starts like this: You’re full of vigor. You rock the bags and own the mats. You live for your next chance to train. And then something new sneaks up on you.
One day, you’re forced to acknowledge that you feel minor discomfort in one of your hips. The pain tolerance you’ve developed over the years enables you to ignore it, perhaps writing it off as a sign you overstretched or landed badly after your last jump kick. But it persists.
Sometimes you hardly notice it. When you’re adrenalized, you move like your old self, but when you’re not, the pain is there. Eventually, you get to a place where there’s no denying the obvious. Something’s not right, and it’s getting worse.
Over time, it gets harder to put on your socks. You start wearing slip-on shoes because tying your laces has become a workout in itself. Then there’s the limping: You don’t notice it at first, but everyone else does.
One day, your foot catches the edge of the carpet and — boom! — you go down face-first.You begin to eat Advil like candy, visit the chiropractor, get X-rays. As the pain worsens, you finally make a date with an MRI machine, and minutes later, the doc delivers the news: Your cartilage is gone, your hip is bone on bone.
You’re now officially a candidate for hip replacement.
WHAT WENT WRONG
The hip is brilliantly designed to deal with repeated motion and function despite a good deal of wear and tear. The largest ball-and-socket joint in the human body, it fits together in a way that allows a wide range of fluid movement.
For example, when you use your hips to kick a heavy bag, a cushion of cartilage helps prevent friction between your thighbone (femur) and the socket that the head of the femur sits in (acetabulum).
Your femur (actually, the femoral head), the acetabulum, the cartilage, and all the tendons and muscles connected to them are durable but not indestructible.
Hips can — and do — wear out for a number of reasons. Often, a worn-out hip causes so much pain that it requires hip-replacement surgery, in which an artificial femoral head and acetabulum are installed. It’s a significant and expensive procedure.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody keeps statistics on how many martial artists get their hips replaced, but the list of veterans who’ve had the surgery done on one or both sides is impressive.
Chuck Norris, Bill Wallace, Billy Blanks, Keith Hirabayashi Cooke, Christine Bannon-Rodrigues, Steve “Nasty” Anderson, Larry Carnahan, Danny Dring, Tom Seabourne, and Joe Hess are just the tip of the iceberg.
They all got to a place where a significant decrease in range of motion and flat-out pain necessitated surgery that entailed amputating the femoral head and attaching a new head to the femur, then grinding out a portion of the hip socket and replacing it with an artificial acetabulum.
The earliest recorded attempts at hip replacement were carried out in Germany in 1891 using ivory to replace the femoral head, which was then attached with nickel-plated screws, plaster of Paris, and glue. Nowadays, hip-replacement surgery is a bit more high-tech.
Unfortunately, it’s also more common. What used to be reserved for people older than 70 is now performed on much younger patients. A 10-year study by the Mayo Clinic revealed that the number of such procedures in the United States rose 92 percent among those 72 and older.
More alarming is that the number jumped by 205 percent among people between 45 and 54.
HIP STORIES
DC Maxwell is a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and was one of the original investors in the UFC. Prior to her involvement in BJJ, which started when she was 39, she was a competitive gymnast, racquetball player, and fitness trainer.
Like so many people who eventually opt for surgery, she said her hip pain came on slowly. It eventually got to a point that made it painful to walk.
“I noticed my hip was really hurting, and it just froze up and I was limping around,” she said. “I didn't want surgery because who wants surgery? But eventually, I just needed to walk without pain.”
Five years ago, Maxwell had her left hip replaced. The procedure enabled her to resume her BJJ training without the pain she’d lived with for so long. She got her life back.
Lou Smith played football at California State University, Fullerton, and went on to play professionally until a knee injury ended his career. He took up Korean martial arts, and when he earned the black belt, then migrated to BJJ, in which he also earned a black belt. Smith knew he had problems with his hips when he started tripping over things and, literally, falling on his face.
“I was walking one day and fell,” he said. “I’m thinking that's nothing, but it started getting worse. I started to trip and fall [frequently] and couldn't catch my balance. There was a really sharp pain that was always going up by my groin and also on the outside of my hip.”
Smith also suffered from having legs of unequal lengths, which was likely caused by the degeneration of bone and cartilage. At 50, he underwent his first operation, and the second came 8 years later.
“The second surgery was easier because I knew what to expect,” said Smith, who’s almost 60 years old and able to train as if his joints had never needed repair. He rates recovery at nearly 100%.
Hips of Heavy Hitters
Bill “Superfoot” Wallace, Billy Blanks, and Christine Bannon-Rodrigues are three of the best-known martial athletes—and kickers—in the world. Each has had one or both hips replaced, which means they know firsthand what the slow decline feels like.
Fortunately, all three also know how good it feels to return to their training after surgery.
Bill “Superfoot” Wallace
Wallace began his martial arts career with wrestling in high school, then judo when he was stationed in Okinawa during the 1960s. He blames his need for his first hip replacement on an incident that took place in 1991 while he served as fight coordinator for The Power of One.
“I was working with Stephen Dorff in an old, rickety boxing ring because it was a period piece from the 1940s,” Wallace said. “I’m bouncing around in this ring, which was really springy, and I bounce down and the ring bounces up and jams my femur head, the left one, up into my acetabulum. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I got home and went to bed, and when I tried to get up the next morning, I couldn’t get out of bed.”
It took eight years for the hip to wear out, after which he had it replaced. Wallace then set about rehabbing his body, no doubt with help from the knowledge he acquired while earning a master’s degree in kinesiology from Memphis State University.
A month after the surgery, he asked his doctor for an official thumbs-up to resume training. The doctor gave him a list of things he’d never be able to do again, like a split.
As he was delivering his recommendations, Wallace slowly dropped into a full split. And he’s still kicking.
Billy Blanks
Billy Blanks, world-champion karate competitor, point fighter, and the creator of Tae Bo, was born with a bad hip.“I was told I’d never be able to stretch very far or do the splits because my tendons were too tight,” he said.
It was, ironically, a visit from Wallace that inspired Blanks, then a young karateka, to strive to overcome his limitations and kick like Superfoot.“He showed me some flexibility exercises, and I started working on them,” Blanks said. “A year later, I was doing the splits.”
About this same time, Blanks began experiencing pain in his hip but discovered he could pop it back into place and cause the pain to fade. He let this go on for years, blissfully unaware he was causing more damage.
“My flexibility came, but at the same time, I didn’t know I was tearing my hip up,” he said.
Blanks made it all the way to his sixth decade before going under the knife. His daughter reached out to the office of a well-known surgeon and had her dad put on a waiting list.
Blanks didn’t expect to land an appointment for a month or more, but he was scheduled for surgery in two days—on his 60th birthday.
Post-surgery, the indomitable fighter was able to walk eight laps around the nurses’ station. Soon after that, he commenced a daily walking program designed to rehabilitate his leg.
“In a month and a half, I was up to 5 miles, and in six months, I was back to kicking and light lifting,” he said. “Today, I’m kicking to the head, I almost have the full splits again and I’m pain-free.”
Christine Bannon-Rodrigues
Christine Bannon-Rodrigues is a nine-time WAKO world champion who, in her heyday, dominated forms, weapons, and sparring. She also worked as a stuntwoman on numerous films, standing in for the likes of Hilary Swank and Alicia Silverstone.
Her hip problems stemmed from her being a rather petite woman training in a man’s world, she said. That forced her to develop her kicking skills to keep her opponents at bay and avoid taking undue punishment. Her hip disintegration is due in part to her penchant for using a side kick to “stuff” her opponents before they could close the gap, she said.
Like many athletes who develop hip problems, Bannon-Rodrigues initially didn’t realize what was causing her discomfort.“I stayed up many nights, unable to sleep because of the pain,” she said.She blamed IT band syndrome, which occurs when the iliotibial band, the ligament that runs down the outside of the thigh from the hip to the shin, is tight or inflamed.
An X-ray revealed the truth, however.“My hips were shot,” she said. The cartilage, which is supposed to form a barrier between the femoral head and the acetabulum, was all but gone. The resulting bone-on-bone contact and bone spurs left her no choice.Bannon-Rodrigues’ surgeon opted for a mini-hip replacement on both sides.
The procedure called for a 4-inch incision at the front of each leg, rather than at the back or side, so the doctor could install the artificial femur head and hip socket.
Furthermore, the surgeries would be done together, without time in between for recovery. It wasn’t the traditional approach, but medical science had seen sufficient advancement in procedures and technology to make it possible.
Seven months out from her surgery, Bannon-Rodrigues is still working on regaining her once-legendary flexibility, but she knows she’ll get there. She’s already started sparring again.“I’m very happy to have had this procedure done,” she said. “I’m pain-free.”
AUTHOR’S STORY, PART 1
I only cried twice over the deterioration and eventual replacement of my own hips. The first time was after I’d driven out of the parking lot of a young doctor of orthopedic medicine in Sacramento, California.
It was 1999, I was 39 years old, and I had been practicing martial arts for 28 years. The pain in my hips had finally reached a level I could no longer live with. I couldn’t put on my socks or tie my shoes. I couldn’t ride a bike, sit in the back seat of most cars, or walk more than two blocks.
Even getting into or out of my car required me to use both hands to move my right leg. Otherwise, it would feel like a knife was being plunged into my hip.
At the conclusion of my meeting with the doctor, he said I should wait until I was older, maybe in my 60s, before considering hip replacement. I said my thanks, paid the fee, hobbled to my car, pulled out of the parking lot, and made it half a block before my eyes filled with tears of frustration, pain, and fear.
My second cry came a year later as my new dog wheeled me out of surgery preparation and down the hall to the operating room. I remember looking up at the fluorescent lights in the hallway as tears streamed down my face. I was afraid.
Up to that point, kicking—speed kicking, power kicking, and jump kicking—had been my love in my life. I wondered if my career as a martial artist was over. Was the hip pain I'd suffered for years going to disappear, only to be replaced by pain from a foreign object embedded in my leg?
Well, I'm happy to say that everything I had to do to rehabilitate myself after the surgery was a breeze. At no time did it even come close to the inconvenience, discomfort, pain, and suffering I endured for so long.
AUTHOR’S STORY, PART 2: HIP NO. 3
Fifteen wonderful years after my second hip replacement—years filled with the joy of pain-free movement and the return of 90% of my kicking ability—I was preparing to fight in the Senior Master World BJJ Championships when I spiral-fractured my right femur.
The hip prosthesis had broken out of the bone, and the bone had fractured from the top of the femur to just above the knee.
It took two months after the operation for me to be able to move that leg more than a few inches. It took another four months for me to be able to visit the dojo I train at, and another month to delicately join the class.
A few more months, and I was finally able to roll without everyone looking at me like I might die. But I'm happy to announce that exactly one year after my break and my third hip replacement, I competed in the Master Worlds and placed third in my division.
It was actually a lackluster fight on my part, but no less a victory considering the severity of the injury.
I’m back. Again.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Dr. Tom Seabourne holds a Ph.D. in exercise science, is a two-time US Taekwondo Union and International Taekwondo champion, fought full contact in the Professional Karate Association, and holds four ultra-distance cycling records.
He also had his hip replaced two years ago after being in denial for decades. Seabourne likens the human hip, femoral head, and acetabulum to a mortar and pestle. If you don't treat yours with some tender loving care, your activities can grind down the cartilage that's supposed to keep bone away from bone and lubricate the surfaces that do make contact.
Once your hip starts grinding itself away, the inflammation caused by the stress can lead to even more problems, Seabourne said. The hip bones are connected, like the old song says, so all the other parts around it.
As the hip seeks to manage the trauma it's experiencing and inflammation takes its toll on muscles, nerves, and tendons, you’ll start limping. After that often comes trouble finding a comfortable position for sleep.
As it did for the martial artists mentioned above, it all snowballs from there.
