Dr. Evan Kappler is 30 years old, a blue belt training at South Boston BJJ, a Doctor of Physical Therapy, and someone who spent months eating food lying on his stomach on a yoga mat because his back hurt too much to sit up. He knows what a serious injury feels like from the inside. He chose not to have surgery. And the journey back to the mats is what now drives every client he works with remotely.
This episode covered the things nobody tells you when you start jiujitsu — that tightness does not mean what you think it means, that stretching is often the wrong answer, that the people who leave the sport are not leaving because they were not tough enough, and that the single most important thing you can build for longevity on the mats has nothing to do with your technique.
It has everything to do with the X axis.
Dr. Evan Kappler — DPT · Blue Belt · Remote Physical Therapist
Doctor of Physical Therapy, Mass General Hospital Institute of Health Professions. Blue belt, South Boston Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Six years of training, multiple injuries including two herniated discs — managed conservatively without surgery. Now runs a fully remote physical therapy and strength and conditioning practice focused on grapplers and active populations.
Free consultation available at drevan.org. Follow his content — he posts gems.
The X Axis Nobody Builds
Evan has a framework for understanding why people keep getting hurt and eventually leaving jiujitsu. He calls it the X axis and the Y axis.
Jiujitsu is a Y-axis activity. The only way you get better at it is to train more. No one has ever gotten around that — you have to be on the mat, in the repetitions, doing the work. But the Y axis alone is not a building plan. It is just a line going up until something fails.
The X axis is everything else. Your strength. Your mobility. Your cardio. Your flexibility. Your sleep. Your recovery. All of the things you do off the mat that determine how high you can build on the Y. A small foundation cannot support a tall structure. And most people who pick up jiujitsu, push the Y axis hard for six months until the X axis fails, get injured, fall behind their training partners, lose motivation, and stop.
They never built the X. They just pushed the Y until something gave way.
"If you just did that — you'd end up in the same spot nine months later as if you'd had the surgery and then done the work anyway."
— Dr. Evan Kappler · @DrEvanKappler · drevan.orgThe biggest mistake Evan sees is grapplers who add high-intensity training alongside jiujitsu rather than in service of it. Crossfit, Olympic lifting, powerlifting — these are not X-axis activities for a grappler. They are a second sport. You are now a two-sport athlete. Everything off the mat should be tailored to support what happens on it — not recreate its intensity elsewhere.
Most gym training — powerlifting, standard strength work — operates in one plane: up and down, front and back. Jiujitsu operates in all three simultaneously: sagittal, frontal, and transverse. If you never train rotation, never train lateral motion, you are going into a sport that demands all three planes from a body that has only been trained in one. Rotational work — particularly thoracic — is one of the first things Evan addresses.
Two 45-minute workouts per week, consistent week over week, 104 sessions in a year — that builds something. One brutal week followed by a shoulder injury followed by three weeks off followed by two sessions followed by another setback builds nothing. Operating at a seven out of ten, every day, beats a ten and a four bouncing around. This is the thing that moves the needle over a lifetime and the thing most people are not doing.
Tight Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
This is probably the most practically useful insight in the episode for anyone who has been dealing with back pain — and it directly explains why stretching the lower back is one of the most common mistakes Evan sees grapplers make repeatedly.
The framework Evan uses is mobility and stability alternating across the joint chain: ankle mobility, knee stability, hip mobility, lumbar stability, thoracic mobility, shoulder and neck stability. Each joint has a primary input that it relies on. When those inputs are mismatched — when you are applying a mobility solution to a stability problem — you make the underlying issue worse, not better.
He puts someone in a chair, arms crossed, and asks them to rotate. Nine times out of ten, the person who says their back is unbearably tight can rotate 90 degrees in each direction without restriction. Full range of motion. They move perfectly. And they still feel tight.
That tightness is not a flexibility deficit. Stretching — pulling the origin and insertion of a muscle apart — is not the solution when the muscle can already move through its full range. The tightness is the lower back doing a job it should not have to do alone. The core is not firing. The glutes are not firing. The lower back is bracing, holding, protecting — all day — and it is exhausted.
Get the core firing. Get the glutes firing. The tightness resolves. Stretch the lower back when this is the problem and you are just moving through the spine repeatedly, aggravating the exact issue you are trying to fix. That cycle can persist for years.
The Batman Neck Problem
We talked about something that shows up in almost every long-term grappler over 35 — the inability to isolate between the neck and the upper back. They move as a unit. The neck cannot move without the whole upper body moving with it. Evan calls this a stability deficit at the neck combined with a mobility deficit at the thoracic spine.
The upper back — the thoracic region — needs to learn to rotate independently. If it has never been trained in rotation, the neck compensates by moving the whole structure. Address the thoracic rotation deficit and the neck regains the ability to isolate. This is low-hanging fruit for most midlife grapplers, most of whom spend ten or more hours a day hunched forward at a screen and then go roll in a defensive guard posture that compounds the same pattern.
- Ankle — Mobility. Restriction here loads the knee and hip abnormally.
- Knee — Stability. Not a mobility joint — instability here is a structural problem.
- Hip — Mobility. Deep ball-and-socket. Restriction here loads the lower back directly.
- Lumbar spine — Stability. Should not be the primary mover when bending. Core and glute firing protects it.
- Thoracic spine — Mobility. This is the most undertrained area in most grapplers. Rotation here is critical.
- Shoulder — Stability. Golf ball on a tee — the rotator cuff holds the joint. Turkish getups are the gold standard input.
- Neck — Stability. Cannot move correctly if the thoracic spine is locked up below it.
Surgery — The Question Most People Are Not Asking
Evan herniated two discs. A young neurosurgeon told him he had two massive herniations and surgery was absolutely an option. He declined and spent eight months rebuilding. He now works with people facing the same decision regularly.
His position is not anti-surgery. It is pro-understanding what surgery does and does not fix. A laminectomy — carving the backside of the spine to release nerve pressure — resolves the radiating symptoms quickly. But it also creates a residual instability that has to be solved for. The disc nutrition that stem cells provide still needs to be supported by the movement and loading protocols that actually address how the disc healed. The work exists on both sides of the surgical table.
Dr. Stuart McGill — widely considered the leading authority on lower back injuries — frames this clearly: imagine you just had the surgery 15 minutes ago. What would you do next? You would do the rehab. You would do the specific progressive loading. You would manage the tissue over months. And if you just started that process now, without the surgery, most people would be in the same place nine months later.
This is not a universal argument against surgery. It is an argument for understanding the decision fully before making it — and recognising that for a large proportion of disc injuries, rotator cuff tears, and similar presentations in active populations, the conservative route with specific, deliberate inputs over time produces equivalent outcomes without the surgical recovery.
Evan's observation about the medical system is worth noting: a doctor with 15 minutes, looking at MRI findings, is optimised to give you an answer in those 15 minutes. That answer is not necessarily calibrated to a 47-year-old who trains twice a day and wants to compete in masters jiujitsu for the next decade. Different demands require different conversations — and different specialists.
Return to Training — The Minor League Model
One of the most practically useful things Evan said is that return to training is not a single day. It is a rehab stint. He uses the MLB minor league model: a professional baseball player who gets hurt does not go from injury to the major league in one step. He plays single A, double A, triple A — gradually building back the capacity to perform at the level he left.
For a grappler returning from a serious injury, this looks like spending an intentionally, almost frustratingly long time just drilling. Telling your instructor you are not rolling. Moving on the mat at a lower level of intensity than you are capable of — because capability is not the same as readiness, and pushing past readiness is how re-injuries happen.
- Start with drilling only — no live rolling. Tell your instructor explicitly. This is not optional.
- Operate intentionally below your capacity for two to eight weeks depending on injury severity.
- First roll: one round, with someone you trust, who you know will work with you rather than at you.
- Week by week: add one round at a time. Sit out rounds deliberately — not because you cannot go, but because you are building capacity, not testing limits.
- Use feedback as data — if drilling a movement causes pain afterwards, that is information. Reduce intensity for the following one to two weeks. If the same drill causes less pain two weeks later, you have more information. The process is iterative.
- The goal is not to return to your pre-injury training volume in the shortest possible time. It is to never have to do this again.
What Evan Does for Himself
He has a health checklist — six items he aims to hit four of every day. Worth sharing because it is simple, specific, and realistic.
- 10,000 steps daily — non-negotiable baseline. Walking is one of the best interventions for back health that exists. Gets him outside. Gets his recovery moving.
- 200g protein minimum — prioritising whole food sources over powder where possible. Powder is a tool, not a food group.
- Eight different vegetables — forces dietary variety, different micronutrient profiles, fermented foods included.
- No phone in the bedroom — old school alarm clock. Phone stays in the office. One of the biggest single changes to sleep quality he has made.
- No alcohol or cannabis — as many days per week as possible. Not abstinence as an ideology — recognising that both meaningfully degrade sleep quality and recovery even in small amounts. Cannabis in particular disrupts REM sleep with consistent use regardless of how it affects subjective sleep onset.
- 15 minutes of meditation — Insight Timer, beach waves, lying down. Not breath retention or hyperventilation. Just deliberate stillness. The counterbalance to the intensity most grapplers are chasing.
Remote Physical Therapy & Strength Conditioning — drevan.org
Evan works entirely remotely — movement analysis, deficit identification, programming, and coaching support. First call is free. If you are dealing with a disc injury, shoulder issue, back problem, or just want someone who actually trains jiujitsu to look at how you move and build a plan around it, this is the person.
His Instagram is worth following for the free content alone. He posts clinical breakdowns in plain language — the kind of information that would cost you a consultation elsewhere.
Stay Dangerous. Stay on the Mats. Hard to Kill in Midlife.
