BJJ / Brazilian Jiu-jitsu with a pacemaker

I posted here a few years ago wondering if anyone trained BJJ with a pacemaker. I'd just gotten a PM and was devastated that I had to give BJJ up beacuse "no contact sports". I went three or so years without training because I was worried about what might happen. I recently started training again and so I'm posting this message so that anyone else in the same boat can contact me about my experience. 

Basically: I thought about BJJ not daily but certainly weekly for three or so years after I got my PM and stopped training. It was a real loss. BJJ is all I wanted to do and it pained me to not be able to train. Early on I found one guy online who trained with a PM, but I wasn't confident enough about his experience to go back. About 3-4 months ago I decided I needed to train and I started reaching out online in various forums again and I ended up finding several people who train with a PM who have about 20 years of training with a PM between them. Their experience was consistent: they train and don't do anything special and haven't had any problems so far. This gave me confidence to go back to training myself. I've been back about 3 months and so far the only issue I've had is occasionally having the area around the PM be sore from taking heavy pressure. It's managable. 

Of course, there could be survivor bias here (the people who died because of training aren't around to say it's a bad idea). But from the last few months it seems to me that if you're prudent about your partners and intensity and are willing to tap early to omoplatas etc on your implanted side then it's doable. 

Anyway, if anyone out there finds themselves in a similar boat, feel free to message me. I can put you in touch with some of the others or at least share more of my experience. 

Best of luck and thank god for this forum! And: oss. 

2 Comments

martial art

by Pfarkas - 2017-03-15 11:26:06

Hi there, I have PM since Jul2015, before that I was training full contact martial art similar to kickbox for 3 years.

After the implant i was like this is it no more martial arts, but after reading people's experience at this page, after 6 months I returned back to martial arts :) I do train 2-3x/week + gym workouts. 

I and my sparring partners are very carefull in regards to the hits to upper body/pacemaker location.

Basically I can say that I do lets say 95% of the stuff I did before PM implant :) which is great :)

BJJ/defibrillator and BJJ.

by Team2 - 2023-01-28 18:56:38

Hello Pfarkas,  

I am a long time Judo and BJJ practioner going on 54 year and very active (I train and teach 4 times a week plus hike 7-10 miles on the weekends).  Just this week I had to go to ED and they put me in ICU, I a complete heart block, what a total suprise...  So now I have Boston Scientific bi-ventricular defibrillator, I am part bionic :-)  I want to get back on the BJJ matts as soon as possible (actually I was there today coaching). Just wandering if you could give me any tips for getting back into it, any does, and don't do, would be helpful... 

FYI: I go back to see my cardologist next week and I think it may be 3 weeks before I could roll again if he OKs it.  We were both hoping there migh be some scientific papers written on it, I will keep searching and report anyting I/we find. 

I thank you in advance for your time and consideration.  Respectfully - Chris 

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I have an ICD which is both a pacer/defib. I have no problems with mine and it has saved my life.