Almost nothing non-traumatic breaks in one moment. It wears out because the same tissue absorbed the same stress a few thousand times in a row. The spot that hurts is rarely the spot that failed. I'm a doctor of physical therapy and a brown belt, and my job is finding what put the load there in the first place.
Sound familiar
"I'll just go light tonight"
Six months of going light isn't a training plan. It's a slow exit from the sport, one round at a time.
"Two weeks off and it'll settle"
It does settle. Rest lowers the demand. Then you come back, the demand returns, and so does the pain, because nothing about your capacity actually changed.
"The MRI showed a bulge, so that's that"
Imaging tells you what your tissue looks like. It is much worse at telling you what hurts, or what you can still do.
The part nobody explained
Non-traumatic injuries are almost always an overstress problem. The interesting question is why the stress kept landing in the same place.
A healthy body has dozens of ways to accomplish the same task. Rotate here instead of there, load this side instead of that one, borrow a few degrees from the joint next door. That redundancy is the entire point. It means no single tissue has to absorb the same stress twice in a row.
Eight hours in a chair. Training that runs in one plane, forward and back, rep after rep. None of it is dangerous by itself. What it does is quietly retire the positions you stop visiting, and a position you never visit is a position you eventually lose access to.
Same guard, same side, same shapes, thousands of times. Jiu jitsu is one of the most repetitive and compressive things you can do to a body, and most people arrive at it already short on options. The mat doesn't start the spiral. It accelerates one that was already running.
Fewer available positions means fewer places to send load, so the same structures take it every single round. Nothing tears in one dramatic moment. One area just absorbs more than its share for years until it starts complaining, and that complaint is the thing you're calling your injury.
Why this is fixable
We are all built more or less the same way, so we tend to lose our options in more or less the same order. The pattern is consistent enough to place someone on it, which means the first job is not guessing. It is working out how far along you have gone, and what is holding you there.
Illustrative, not a diagnosis. Where you actually sit on this is what the assessment is for, and it is also why two people with identical symptoms often need completely different work.
The system
Four phases, in that order, and the order is the whole point. Strength added on top of a restriction just makes the compensation stronger.
Where are you on the pathway, and what are the rate limiting factors in your movement profile that keep forcing load into the painful area? This is a full profile, not a poke at the sore spot. Most of what matters shows up somewhere else entirely.
Break the pattern that has you stuck. Usually that means addressing the specific muscular and joint restrictions holding you in the position you have defaulted to. The goal here is narrow and concrete: get access back to positions you currently cannot reach.
Access on its own does not last. Now you go into those positions and coordinate the musculature that holds them, so your body can own the range instead of borrowing it. In plain terms, this is re-teaching your body how to move, and it is the phase most rehab skips entirely.
A position you can only hold when fresh and calm is not much use in round five. So we challenge it under real intensity and real fatigue. Where a specific tissue needs to get stronger, tendons especially, it gets loaded deliberately to give it a reason to adapt.
The finish line is not "the pain stopped." It is variability restored: more ways to move, so stress spreads across your whole body instead of piling into one place. That is also the only real counterweight to a sport that is repetitive and compressive by design.
Start here
Everything below is free. Start with whichever one matches what's bothering you.
Guide · PDF
The four-step framework I use with every grappler whose pain keeps returning, plus Jeremy's story: a recommended spinal fusion he turned out not to need.
Program · Free
The low back pays for what the hips and the mid-back stopped doing. This gives back the rotation and extension it has been borrowing from, then rebuilds what it can tolerate under load.
Get it free →Program · Free
Targets rib cage expansion, one of the most common underlying limitations behind shoulder pain in grapplers. When the ribs start moving properly again, the shoulder stops absorbing what they should have been handling.
Get it free →Program · Free
Targets pelvic position and your ability to control it, which is usually what sits behind that pinching pressure at the front of the hip where the pelvis meets the femur. Control the position and the impingement stops happening.
Get it free →Program · Free
Targets tibial rotation, the missing link in most knee rehab. Restoring that articulation is what gives you full knee bend back, so you can sit back on your heels and play guard without the knee complaining.
Get it free →One-on-one coaching
Limited spots, by application only.
A program can't watch you move. This is the version where I do. I assess you directly, build the plan around your injury and your game, then adjust it as things change, and we don't stop when the pain quiets down. We stop when your capacity is above what a hard round asks of you.
Best fit if you have already tried the passive route, or if there is more than one thing going on at once.
What's included
How it works
Step 01
A short form about the injury, what you have already tried, and what you are trying to get back to. I read every one myself and only take people I am confident I can actually help.
Step 02
A live video call. Full movement screen, history, and the positions that set it off. By the end you will understand what is driving your pain. Most people say it is the first time anyone explained it.
Step 03
Through all four phases, in order. The finish line is not "the pain stopped." It is capacity above what a hard round demands, and knowing your own body well enough to keep it that way.
Who you'd be working with
Dr. Artem Imnadze, DPT
Two surgeries. Two years off. Nobody could tell me why it still wasn't working.
I came at this from two directions. The first was frustration. I fractured my spine in high school and the rehab I got left a lot to be desired. Even at that age it was obvious that somebody could be doing this much better for athletes.
The second is the part I actually enjoy. I got hooked on movement and training early, and physical therapy turned out to be the rare job that is mostly puzzle solving. Where is the problem, why is it happening there, and how did this person end up here in the first place. That is still the part I like most.
Then I tore my ACL and meniscus in the finals of a jiu jitsu tournament. Two surgeries, complications after both of them, and two years off the mat. The conventional path ran out of ideas long before I was anywhere close to training again, so I went outside it and found people who looked at the whole system instead of the injured piece. That is what got me back to competitive powerlifting and back to rolling, and it is the reason I work the way I do now. I know exactly what it is like to be the case that isn't going to plan.
I started in judo at twelve, wrestled through high school, and picked up jiu jitsu around the same time. I haven't stopped since. I also run Next Level Physical Therapy just outside Philadelphia, where I work with athletes and active adults at every level, including professionals from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NWSL and PLL.
Outside of that I'm married with three young boys. Whatever time isn't spent working or training goes to them, and most of our summers go to the Jersey Shore.
And when the answer is imaging or a surgical opinion, I say so and help you get there. Knowing when not to treat you is part of the job.
Verified Google reviews
I came in with severe low back pain, the kind that was stopping me from training and affecting daily life. I've trained jiu-jitsu for over a decade and have multiple herniations and severe disc degeneration, so I've worked with plenty of PTs. What I experienced with Artem stood out immediately. We didn't just treat symptoms, we worked on the underlying issues, step by step. I'm moving better, feeling stronger, and getting back to the mats with confidence.
When I started to have severe neck pain, he was the obvious solution. We began rehab but symptoms did not change, so Artem heavily recommended I get an MRI. It was discovered I had a ruptured disc pushing on my spinal cord. The surgeon said I was lucky not to be paralyzed. Following surgery I reconnected with Artem to resolve the lingering posture issues. My posture is fixed and the nerve issues have disappeared.
I had a lingering shoulder injury that made it difficult to sleep and was jeopardizing my ability to bow hunt and train BJJ. I had done PT previously, met with an orthopedic surgeon, and thought my only solution was surgery. It turned out he could address the pain and get to the crux of the movement dysfunction causing it. Best archery season ever, and still training BJJ 4x a week.
I came to Artem after two shoulder subluxations within 2 to 3 years of each other from doing jiu-jitsu. Before I even saw an orthopedic specialist he already knew what the problem was. I gained a ton of mobility back and regained my strength. I was able to still train jiu-jitsu every week and even compete. If you're a fighter or combat sport athlete, look no further.
I struggled with lower back issues and periodic spasms for more than five years. As I got older and kept lifting and doing BJJ through my late 30s, it killed not only my progress but my quality of life. He didn't just hand me a set of PT exercises. He built a progressive regimen with weekly checkpoints covering joint limitations, strength, and patterns I didn't know existed. He made me capable of competing again.
After multiple PT attempts, cortisone shots, and visits with orthopedics I thought I was done. My knee pain was just a fact of life. Dr. Artem had me figured out after the first session. I noticed improvement after my first visit. I'm done with him now and it was worth every penny. Full range of motion and I just started running again.
As a professional jiu-jitsu athlete, Dr. Artem has helped me recover from serious injuries and helped me understand where my pain is coming from and why. Highly recommend him.
He's helped me regain pain-free movement in my hips, back and shoulders that I had lost from 28 years of training and fighting in MMA.
I worked with Dr. Artem in preparation for my next submission wrestling tournament. I had minor injuries that he helped me build strength back to, and now I feel more flexible and stronger than before.
Before you apply
Grapplers with pain that keeps coming back. Usually that means one issue that has hung around for months or years, or several that take turns. Usually you have already tried things: physical therapy, chiropractic, massage, time off. Each helped for a while and then it returned the moment you went back to training, because nobody addressed the movement problem underneath it. If that is your situation, this is built for you. If the injury is a few weeks old and this is your first attempt at getting it looked at, you are probably not the right fit yet. Start with the free programs.
I read the application myself and text you to go through your history, so we both know whether this makes sense before anyone pays for anything. If it does, we book the assessment. Afterwards I write up the analysis and build you an initial plan to start on. How your body responds to that plan tells us both a great deal, and it is what shapes the next step. If it makes sense to keep going from there, the full program is called Train BJJ Pain-Free, and we talk about it then.
A full movement analysis. Not a look at the sore spot, and not a repeat of the diagnosis you already have, but a proper dive into how you move, where your restrictions are, and why load keeps ending up in the same place. What you get back is an explanation of the actual root cause and an initial plan built from it. Clients routinely tell me it is the most thorough assessment they have ever had and the most valuable part of the whole process.
I have been working virtually since 2020, across hundreds of movement assessments, and it is rare that being online is the thing limiting a case. Almost everything I need to see, I can see. Where someone genuinely needs hands-on work, I help them find a practitioner near them and communicate with that person directly so the manual work supports the plan instead of pulling against it. I also work with people outside the US regularly. The only real constraint there is finding a call time that survives the time difference.
Almost never. Rest lowers the stress going in, which is why things feel better for a while, but it does not give you back a single one of the movement options you lost. That is why the pain returns the moment training does. Usually we modify instead: which positions to sit out for now, who to roll with, what intensity, and for how long.
Yes. Imaging shows what your tissue looks like, not what is generating your symptoms, and those are not the same thing. More often than not, that finding is evidence of a movement habit. The pattern that loaded the area badly enough to create the structural change is usually the same pattern producing your pain. Which is why treating the structure on its own leaves the cause untouched: it does nothing about how the damage happened, and nothing about why it still hurts. Finding that driver is exactly what the assessment is for, so we can change it and keep you from either adding to the damage or creating a new problem somewhere else down the line.
Expect twenty to thirty minutes of homework a day, most days. It is a fairly direct relationship: the more consistently you do it, the faster this moves. Equipment is flexible. If you have a gym I will program around it. If you do not, we use what you have, and anything you end up needing is inexpensive.
No. Everything here is self-pay, with no insurance billing involved.
Once you are past the normal tissue healing window, yes. For an ACL that usually means somewhere past the six month mark, when the question stops being whether it is healing and becomes whether you are ready to return to the mat. That phase is squarely what I do. If you are freshly post-op, you are not ready for this yet and you should stay with whoever is managing that.
Not on the assessment and initial plan. That stage exists so you can decide whether this is worth continuing, which is rather the point of it. The full program does come with a guarantee, and the terms are written out in the information I send before you commit to anything.
Jiu jitsu does not stop being repetitive and compressive because you feel better. If you go back to exactly the same inputs with nothing offsetting them, you will drift back down the same pathway, just from a better starting point. So part of the work is making sure you leave knowing what your body specifically needs to counterbalance the sport. Most people need far less than they expect once the hard part is done.
Generally not. Everything here is built around what grappling specifically does to a body, and that focus is the reason it works as well as it does. The exception is a direct referral from someone I already work with.
Limited spots each month
Fill out the application and we'll get on a call. Either way you will leave understanding your injury properly, which, judging by how most people arrive, will be a first.
