If you do BJJ and have achy joints a lot of the time, you’re not alone.
It comes up a lot, especially with grapplers 40 and older.
For me, it started even earlier than that. Surprisingly, the main culprit wasn’t age or injuries…
Over a decade ago, I saw a piece that a chiropractor wrote on Vitamin D deficiency that got my attention because the experience of his patient exactly mirrored mine.
For several years at least, I could not remember the last time I had gotten out of bed in the morning without feeling tired and aching to the bone.
By all standard tests I was healthy, but just didn’t feel good at all.
I decided to get a very comprehensive battery of blood tests and, low and behold, when the results came back one of the big revelations was that I was extremely deficient in Vitamin D.
The physician I saw said that most people are, especially in less sunny parts of the country. Just like the guy in the letter below (the chiropractor’s patient), I was prescribed 5,000 IU of Vitamin D3 daily in conjunction with magnesium, and after a fairly short period of time it dawned on me that the pain I had experienced every morning for as long as I could remember had pretty much disappeared.
Now don’t get me wrong, I still had (and have) some aches and pains from some of my injuries of course, but not the perpetual tired and sore state I was in before taking the D3.
Does this mean you should run out and do the same? No. Because I’m not a physician, and I’m not going to pretend I’m qualified to give medical advice.
But if you have experienced anything similar, it maybe worth checking out and getting some more extensive blood work of your own. Over the years since I first wrote about this, a number of my online students have done just that and reported similar results to my own.
It seems to be quite common in fact. Unfortunately, I fear that a lot of people just live with it and never realize that it could be so easily solved just with a little more sun and supplementation.
Here’s the email from that chiropractor’s patient (I saved it after all these years):
“From our Mailbag:
Hi Ben, well, you have me fully convinced with the whole vitamin D thing. It’s been one year now since I’ve been taking 5,000 IU daily and I feel like I have my 20 plus years of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia beat. After all of the doctor’s visits, tests, treatments and doubting myself and thinking that it might really be psychosomatic, turns out that all along it was just a deficiency in vitamin D.
The endocrinologist is still offering me androgel, but I don’t see the point in that. I feel normal again, and all I do is take my vitamin D!
Grateful thanks for helping me lick CFS andfibromyalgia. I should have asked you about this years ago.
Ron G.Downers Grove, IL “
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“From Dr. Kim:
Ron is a former chiropractic patient of mine who found our site and wrote to me about a year ago, looking for some advice for full-body aches and chronic fatigue that plagued him for years. From what he shared, my first thought was that he exhibited classic signs of vitamin D deficiency, misdiagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia.
A quick blood test (for 25 hydroxy D) revealed a severe deficiency, which I recommended that he correct by taking 5,000 IU of vitamin D-3 daily. It really is that simple in some cases.
Vitamin D deficiency is arguably the most common nutritional deficiency in first world nations today. Sadly, being D-deficient increases risk of virtually every health challenge that we know of, including a tendency to experience inexplicable aches, pains, and physical injuries.”
