This was originally recorded in September of 2021. It's a powerful message and I want to share it with you again to make sure you don't miss it... and if you've heard it before check it out again. Getting into my late forties, early fifties, I was broken. I was looking at a life of excruciating pain...
This was originally recorded in September of 2021. It's a powerful message and I want to share it with you again to make sure you don't miss it... and if you've heard it before check it out again. Getting into my late forties, early fifties, I was broken. I was looking at a life of excruciating pain...
Seven surgeries.
That's what I was looking at. I couldn't believe it a longer story, but let me give you a quick little thumbnail of a view of where I was in the mid two thousands. Broken, broken. I had been a weekend athlete. I was pretty good at most sports. I'd been a diehard weekend athlete.
Because of that, I had beat the daylights out of my body. Getting into my late forties, early fifties, I was broken. I was looking at a life of excruciating pain... getting in and out of the car. Oh my God. I'd have to lift one leg in, hang on with both hands to the outside of the car and then painstakingly bring in the other leg.
Getting up and down off the floor. If I got on the floor, which I usually avoided, I would have to crawl over to a chair and drag myself up. Oh my God, the pain was just awful. So we had a condo in San Diego at the time and I decided I was going to go to San Diego sports medicine. And these guys are great.
So don't get me wrong. This is not an indictment of San Diego sports medicine. So I went to San Diego Sports Medicine. And I told the doctor, I said, my God, I'm I'm in so much pain. And I feel way too young to be going through this. He said, well, let's do some diagnostics. So that session, another session I went and I came back and he said, you know, we're going to have to run more tests, but I believe we're looking at a total of seven surgeries.
And I was like surgeries!!! I was shocked. The reason I went to San Diego sports medicine, they were the local doctors for the, for the local professional sports team, for the Padres and the chargers at the time. I thought, boy, these guys will have all kinds of great therapies and exercises and things I can do to heal myself.
Well, as it turned out, they just felt the surgeries were, were what I needed. We're talking feet knee hips shoulder and back, oh God, I'm so glad I didn't get the back surgery.
That was devastating. He was talking two to three years of in and out of the hospital and yeah, I really hope in retrospect, I'll give you a quick little sidelight here.
I really hope in retrospect, he was trying to scare me into doing something, although he didn't give me any alternatives. He just said he wanted to schedule another appointment, which I did. And I just. knew , there had to be something else. Peggy and I had tried. We'd been lifting weights for years. We even did a couple of body transformation contests, Peggy won one with max muscle.
We were working hard and it helps some we wanted to lose a little bit of weight and trim up. So when we were lifting weight, they put us on a low carb diet, which took care of some of the issues I'd had in the past. Turned out I was a diabetic, which we didn't know until much later, 2007, in fact, and being on the low carb diet, I wasn't eating much sugar and some other issues I'd had vertigo and some things actually healed .
So we had made some progress that wasn't like, we were just couch potatoes. You know, we walked a lot. We love to walk, we ran and we lifted weights, but it just wasn't something was wrong . Because I was getting worse and worse and worse.
Well, I'm going to keep this story very short.
What we did, we did some research and actually I'm going to tell this little story, how we found resistance stretching.
We were at a concert of borders music in San Diego. There was a local street musician, Steven Yberra that I really liked. I mean, this guy was a guitar player and just kind of a folk ballad type singer and I really enjoyed him. He had, he wasn't on the street this particular time. He was actually doing a concert at borders books.
So we went to borders books and I'm sitting in the front row listening to him. I knew I was there for the concert because getting up and down and walking around the store would have been excruciating. Peggy had the opposite problem at the time. She couldn't set for more than a few minutes before she would get sore.
She had similar issues. She'd been a runner and been an athlete. And it just was her body. She was paying the price. Also many of us, many of the people we've worked with, we find most people in their forties and fifties start breaking down a little bit. But you don't have to.
Peggy was going up and down the aisles in borders books, could still hear Steve. And I think I was a bigger fan than her, but could still hear Steve. She was going up and down and as she was going up and down this book caught her eye. It was called the genius of flexibility. In this book, the author described how he'd been in this horrific, horrific accident... motorcycle accident.
They had told him he would never walk again. Well, he was determined. To walk again. He spent hours, hours, days, weeks trying to stretch out his legs. And he finally did. He finally figured out that he could become very flexible and he found by accident. He did a forward fold and all of a sudden his chest went all the way to the floor.
This was sitting wide legged on the floor. He couldn't duplicate it again until he finally did and realized it was stretching the muscles under contraction.
Another long story short... bob completely healed, walks and is now a trainer. Works with hundreds, thousands of people in the country.
I took that book as inspiration and that book turned my life around.
Not just the book, but resistance stretching in general. Turned my health around. We found a couple, Steve and Anne, Anne Tierney and Steven Sierra. And they had, they had a modality. Stephen had worked with Bob, had helped develop Bob's whole program, and ended up going out on his own for a lot of reasons that I won't get into here.
But Steve had another theory. He was the one who decided that you needed actually to stretch stronger, to build the muscles through the full range of your motion.
That is what made the total difference.
So Kihara was, was kind of our, our Bally wick, and it's what healed me totally. I'm not going to get into everything that happened on this podcast. I'll save that for another podcast.
What I want you to know is have the inspiration to know, no matter what your diagnosis is, you can move well and stay healthy.
I'm a perfect example.
I went from broken, from basically crippled, to being a trainer now for over 10 years, working with thousands of people, to help them move and feel better.
I truly believe even if it's not what we do, there are things out there.
There are things out there. I truly believe StretchPro resistance stretching and everything else that Peggy and I and Kim and I teach is exactly what most people need.
That's why we teach it.
Develop this overall program, which combines a whole bunch of different, not just resistance, stretching, it combines role model and yoga therapy and bands and breath and nutrition.
I truly believe that you can find something that will help you heal.
Now, if you separate a shoulder, you're going to have to get that surgery .
But anything short of that, try some other modalities first... and know, know nine people out of 10 that we work with, turn their health around .
I want you to know you can move well, you can stay healthy and get happy.
Take my example.
I totally avoided seven surgeries.
I move and feel better at 68 than I did at 30.
I wish the same for you.
Have an amazing day and we will talk to you next time.