How I hurt my neck

My previous blogs have raised some questions. There was one question which really stood out: ''How did you hurt your neck?'' I'm going to try and answer this question as complete as a possibly can.

The exact injury in my neck was a twisted vertebra. Actually, I had three twisted vertebrae. It happened in one of my tournaments earlier this year. April, to be exact. I sounds incredibly cliché, but it was a regular tournament in Schiedam. I had done my warming-up, sweat running down my forehead, and was waiting to face my first opponent. The judoka I was placed against was the black-belted Mr. Meijers (I refuse to say his first name because of privacy reasons). Anyway, the match didn't last long. In the first 30 seconds Mr. Meijers tried to throw me on my back using ippon seoi otoshi (judo throw), and I dove head-first into the tatami (the mat). The clip below shows some different techniques of the ippon seoi otoshi, and the one which starts at 1:30 demonstrates the best what it looked like when I hurt my neck.

                           (1:30 - the throw looks a lot like the throw because of which I hurt my neck)

My recovery took approximately 8 months, in which my vertebrae were twisted in reverse four times, of which three ultimately failed (I fell on my neck again those three times, twisting the vertebrae again). After the fourth time I decided to stop my trainings for a couple of weeks, with a successful outcome.

Now I'm fully recovered, and once again I'm training 5-6 times a week (don't ask me where I got the time from, because I don't have that much time. It is really hard to combine sport and school, but I'm trying my best).