Hoop Junkie: Autobiography of an Unlikely Trainer

PART 1: LOVE

I was born tall and weak.

That’s how I became an unlikely expert.

At birth I had my dumb betraying umbilical cord suffocating me, this is where I first gained my determination. My first moments were spent fighting to breathe. Nice try life, but you picked the wrong dude.

I love basketball.

By “love” I mean unhealthily obsessed with the game. A good portion of my life has been…eat, ball, sleep, repeat. Then get enough money to keep the cycle going. I can ruin any relationship in less than 24 seconds over basketball.

I am a hoop junkie with whom all forms of intervention have failed.

This is a true story of love, heartache, determination, and learning life through a passion.

I hope you have a passion.

I still remember the first time I ever played basketball. I was 8 years old and I hated it. I had already found soccer and had no interest in playing on this tiny “field,” getting my hands all dirty and slapped red, with some rules that made no sense.

But, I was tall, so the game keep trying.

As I got serious into basketball as a teenager I started strength training. My coaches told me I needed to get stronger. This was my first introduction to training. I did everything they asked. Bench, squats, deadlifts, plyos, sprints, whatever they told me to do, I did it. I wore these platform shoes called jump soles around all day walking on my toes. I got stronger and I got explosive. The rim and I became peers, rather than someone I looked up to.

Looking back, at the time I thought I was gaining strength, but what I was really gaining was life knowledge. I was training completely wrong for my body’s way of moving, and developed great imbalances within my body which led to 20 years of injury cycles.

Now I know the truth. Here’s the truth about the truth… it changes. Took me a long time to first recognize, and then accept that. More on that later.

So I got stronger, gained a college scholarship, and was living my destiny. Then this play happened and my real destiny began.

PART 2: HEARTACHE

I cut without the ball from the wing to the free throw line, caught the ball and turned to basket, and pop. I tore my ACL and meniscus on a such a routine play. Why me? My love, taken. But I will come back better, stronger than before.

Surgery, rehab, physical pain, mental pain, fear, caution, anxiety, dedication, passion, growth, joy… 6 months later I’m playing again.

A couple months later, getting confident again, I tear the same meniscus.

Surgery, repeat physical and emotional roller coaster… 3 months and I’m back playing again. But of course, I tear the same meniscus again. Surgery, they take it out. At this point, I’m 21 years old, I’ve had $100,000 of surgery, rehab, and advice from knee experts in less than a year.

This is when your friends and family, with concern start telling you change your passion, as if that’s a thing.

Of course, I cannot, and will not, ever stop playing basketball.

So I learned to play on a bad knee. My body found ways to manage the movements. I took painkillers like vitamins, ice became my Lord and Savior, I worshipped knee braces.

I would go hoop, I could still do my thing no doubt, and for those moments I was free mentally and physically. Then I would hobble to the car, go home and stay in bed for days sometimes, until I could play again. Depressed, my body was failing me, I’m losing faith in myself, and I’m losing trust in anyone else. I did what the doctors, therapists, coaches, and trainers told me to do. How did I end up a senior citizen in my 20s?

I continued playing, because for some psychological reason that I will never unravel, I just have to.

Then came the back pain.

I would trade my bad knee and my good knee to get rid of the back pain. I can barely move for weeks on end. Socks become obsolete because I can’t reach my feet. I have pain sitting, standing, walking, and laying down. Im desperate. The doctor tells me they don’t see anything structurally wrong. I need rehab they say. My core is weak, i’m tall so I have to bend further, my pelvis is tilted, I have bad posture, I need to keep my spine neutral (whatever that means). Here you go, do these exercises everyday for the rest of your life to manage the problems.

Ok. So I do them, everyday. The back pain comes and goes mysteriously for years. I can run sprints at the track, but I can’t ride in a car. I can work construction all day, but I can’t bend over the sink to wash my hands. Makes no sense. Anyways, I keep playing basketball when I am able to get out of bed, because, as I stated, I must.

By now, my family and friends are suggesting I stop playing basketball. They are right. They are tired of seeing me injured or in pain. My identity becomes Mr. Glass. The standard greeting I get from them is “How’s your back?” This all serves to further feed my own negative perception of self. I constantly fear injury. Every movement I make from the time I first open my eyes is calculated with caution. Maybe there is a stretch I need to learn, or a strength exercise I can find. Because giving up basketball, accepting I’m this fragile person, it’s just not imaginable to me. How do you give up your passion? How do you stop loving your lifelong love?

My redeeming quality and savior is I have, and always have had since birth, a persisting irrational hope within me.

Then came the turning point. I was at work and I bent over briefly to grab a pencil off the ground. Instantly, I couldn’t move. I sarcastically realized my back just “went out” while deadlifting a pencil. I happened to be outside in the pouring rain, by myself. As I laid there, for the first time in my life, I lost hope. Two hours passed before someone came to help. The strangest two hours of thinking I’ve ever done.

Back to the routine, doctors, specialists, physical therapy, chiropractor, massage, acupuncture. Tens of thousands of dollars in treatment. They call it a “lumbar strain.” “These things are common,” they say. Almost rationalizing the danger of picking up pencils. It’s a well oiled machine, this industry of injury. If anyone would have taken a moment to look me in the eye, they may have noticed that the pain was coming from a much deeper place than a random lumbar tendon. But I didn’t understand this concept at the time. I just followed the rules, and the rules are that physical pain has a physical source which needs physical treatment. If these rules are broken, a lot of people start losing a lot of money. Pain is money. So, I did every treatment and every exercise. Blindly.

PART 3: DETERMINATION

A word of advice if I may. Understand the why of your training methods. Understand why you are doing certain exercises, understand the goal and technique of the movement. How do the different movements fit together? If you train from YouTube videos, are those videos beneficial to YOU, to the way YOUR body is designed? Don’t just trust an “expert.” I mean, it’s your body, you get one of them. This story would be way shorter if I would have understood that concept 25 years ago.

Now, plot twist.

I was desperate, as you may imagine. Or as you may be right now if you are stuck in a injury cycle.  A good family friend that i’ve known my whole life recommended a book to me. He left it at that. No promises, no expectations. They just said “you might check out this book.” Okay. The book is called “The Mindbody Prescription” by Dr. John Sarno. He is the kind of Doctor that Doctors hate. He makes the case that most pain syndromes and many other common physical problems have an emotional root deep within the brain. He argues that many physical problems don’t require a physical or mechanical origin. That physical pain can be a strategy of the brain to distract us from emotional distress which the brain does not want to process. This doesn’t mean the pain isn’t real, or that a person is a hypochondriac. Observable physical alterations take place, initiated however by the brain and not a structural abnormality. Over time, the tissues of the structure do begin to change due to stored stress. Even more sinister, he says that physical treatments we under go actually only serve to solidify the brain’s strategy to distract. The more we address the problem physically, the more we believe the problem is physical. Therefore, keeping us in the cycle of pain. Dr. Sarno names this phenomenon “Tension Myofascial Syndrome” or TMS. If someone told “pain free” me this, I would have laughed. But desperate me was… well, desperate.

I read the book. Within 3 days, my back pain was mostly gone. Back pain that had went on for 10 years. Back pain for which I had seen every specialist, tried every treatment, which ruled my existence for a decade. Yes, by the way, I am aware this is totally crazy. But don’t have me committed quite yet.

Here is what happened. I recognized pain can have many origins, not just physical. I recognized that the nervous system can make us feel all kinds of ways, for example when we are nervous we exhibit a host of physical symptoms, initiated by the brain. Also, there are many studies done showing MRI imaging which found things such as herniated disks, meniscus tears, rotator cuff tears, in which the people have no pain, restriction, or awareness of a problem. And vice versa, people with all the symptoms, yet nothing found wrong.

Why this discrepancy? Why did humans exist for thousands of years without these problems, but in the last 40-50 years backs and knees have become our weakness as a species? How come there are people with good posture having back pain, and people with bad posture without back pain? How come back problems are most common between 30-60? Shouldn’t the elderly have the worst backs? Shouldn’t surgeries that correct the mechanical source of the pain make the pain go away? Why do these people continue to have pain after all these treatments to correct the problems?

All things I considered which don’t make sense. Leading me to be open to the idea that yeah, maybe we are missing something here. Clearly, the traditional methods weren’t working for me.

Even more eye opening are the case studies of Dr. Sarno and those who have continued to unravel these mysteries. Of the thousands of patients he treated, about 88% reported no longer having back pain. Keep in mind, most of these people were desperate like me. The most persistent cases that had gone on for decades in many of them. Which no other form of treatment was successful. Even more astounding is the method of treatment. Knowledge. For close to 90%, acquiring knowledge of the brains pain strategy, ended the pain permanently. If knowledge can cure a physical problem, then the problem wasn’t physical. Is the Doctor 100% correct in all of his beliefs? Probably not. But the evidence is undeniable. No doubt there are people that need physical treatment for injuries. But the body, as does nature, heals itself with time. Unexplained pain that goes on for years, doesn’t make sense. But here is the thing with our world, physical pain is totally acceptable, even considered normal. Emotional pain, not so much. That makes you a head case. Even though emotional pain is so much more normal than physical pain. We avoid it. The brain just thrives on the fakeness.

So for me, I generate a great deal of stress with my patterns of thinking. I also hide it well. I’ve lived through some tragic situations that have stuck with me, which I never really addressed properly. These things were building inside and needed to escape. But since it’s my nature to bury rather than release, these emotions manifested themselves physically. Once I realized what was happening, in combination with all the tests I’ve had showing no sign of cause for the pain, my pain went away. A book changed my mindset and I took back control. I wouldn’t believe this if I wasn’t the one typing it. But it happened.

My passion for basketball kept me searching for answers. My search for answers made me my own expert. This empowered me. No longer fearing injury, or questioning what’s wrong with me, I was free to take control.

I wanted to address my stupid knee that started this wild journey. Was my knee really “worn out” as the doctor said? What does that even mean? I was not sure. I definitely have structural issues with my knee. So I searched for a different ways of training by considering common pain within different cultures.

I realized people are literally training themselves into injury. They avoid “rounding the back,” or “knees over toes” because those positions are “unsafe.” Then, in the game, or in life, they hurt themselves in those exact positions they avoid training in. If we shouldn’t be rounding our back, then our back wouldn’t round. If we shouldn’t go knees over toes, we would all have little stubs for femurs.

People train their hips and posterior to develop power that their knees and feet cannot stop. We glamorize acceleration and explosiveness, and forgot about deceleration and force absorption. We use form to “isolate” muscles for maximum growth, but muscles don’t work in isolation within the body. We produce visually impressive looking bodies that breakdown with little things like tendonitis and back spasms.

Western cultures seem to produce more preventable injuries within the populations. This I believe is because of daily routine, poor nutrition, poor education about our bodies, and impatience.

So I began to value routine and movement rather than supplements and muscles. We are only as strong and protected as our end range of strength allows us to be. We need to be flexible, and strong throughout the whole range of motion which a joint is designed to move. If stuck in an injury cycle, this gives the body a chance to heal, which it is always trying to do.

I have gained an incredible education and experience in regaining function of movement throughout the body with this view of training. At 45 years old, I can do things physically I never imagined. I can play basketball with freedom again. Competing against college guys, overseas guys, 20-25 years younger than me… I cannot explain the joy and satisfaction. That 13 year old kid in me is still there, trying to get better.

Some days my knee does start to hurt, some days my back starts to hurt… But now I am the expert, so I don’t fear it. I rest, I eat and hydrate, and I try to think about what is in my mind that could be bothering me. I don’t panic with pain. I carry on with my day as normal helping others, and I forget about myself.

Almost done.

PART 4: PASSION

Stupidly, I’m thankful for this strange twisted journey of desperation. Because now I feel like I have found some truth. Through desperation and irrational persistence I was led to these solutions. Now I can help others. That desperate confused kid within me can now save someone else years of pain. How valuable is that?

Training is not science, it is art.

Science changes, so the art of training should adapt to your unique circumstances in realtime. For me, a training session is like a basketball game, we start with a structure and a game plan, but we adjust as we go to get the most value out of each session. You gotta leave feeling better every time.

Being a Hoop Junkie was the catalyst. If I didn’t love basketball in such a twisted, borderline perverted fashion, I would have given up two decades ago. Thankfully I could not. Now I am enlightened, understanding what the majority do not accept. That pain has many origins. That the body and mind need balance to coexist. We should be our own expert.

I have found truth within myself through this journey. Im not weak. I am persistently, irrationally, stubbornly, strong!

And if I am strong, someone who was born tall and weak, someone who lived on a bed, who feared putting on socks, and broke himself deadlifting a pencil. If I am strong, then you are strong too. So I have set out to prove there is strength within us which is waiting to be found.

As a Fitness Coach, now I help others find their truth. It’s named Verity MVMT because it is a verity movement. A truth movement to understand true movement. Change the way you think about pain. Change the way you think about training. Be hopeful, be irrationally persistent, find your inner strength to access your outer strength and rebuild better.