Yes, I’m saying it again: I’m more athletic now, in my early 40’s, than I’ve ever been in my entire life. Without going into all the nerdy biomechanics (which I will one day if people request), I twisted my ankle severely while playing basketball when I was somewhere between 7-9 years old and I’ve had a recurring back injury since I was 17 years old (this has a unique origin I’ll get into more later in the article). Up until the last 2 years, my legs and my back had given me trouble my entire life. My back and lower body have always been the limiting factors in my athletic development. With the help of following protocols from Ben Patrick (aka – kneesovertoesguy) and some other strategies I’ve gained over the years, my legs and hips have become more mobile than ever and my back hasn’t given me any problems in a couple of years. The main problem in my lower body was stiffness which ultimately led to weakness. Similarly in my back, I was dealing with some hyperactive muscles which led to spasms that would take me out of commission periodically. In the last two years I’ve been able to make significant progress in both areas and I’m feeling excited about what the next 20 years holds for my athletic development.
But, I can’t help thinking about what could have been if I had the knowledge I have today, back when I was a teenager trying to lose weight. Back when I was struggling so hard to compete with the other kids physically. Back when I was being mocked everyday for being overweight and slow. Back when pain in both knees was just a part of my day. I haven’t cried about this stuff in a long time but, ironically, the progress I’ve been making in my body recently, is bringing up those hard emotions even as I write this.
What could I have been? Could I have played collegiate sports? Could I have been a professional athlete?
As someone who has never been able to identify a traditional job or career that I enjoy, these questions loom large in my mind. Maybe with a little bit of knowledge and support, I could have made a real run at what were my dreams. Many young men dream of being professional athletes. I don’t consider myself special in that regard. However, sometimes it feels like the dream was taken before I could even get started on it. Again, I know that there are many young people who have their sports careers cut prematurely because of heinous injuries. I also know that in many ways the concept of being a professional athlete is a privilege of the western world. I have perspective and that lets me explore the value in the pain and disappointment of being held back by injuries for so many years…
Intense Struggle Comes Before Lasting Peace
In my time as a personal trainer I had many clients ignore my advice because I wasn’t the strongest person in the gym. Our lower bodies are the foundation of most athletic movements. At the time, I was heavily involved in a Crossfit gym. Crossfit incorporates many movements that require lower body mobility and strength in order to excel. There are also lots of challenges to the core and back. My legs and back were the parts of my body most vulnerable to injury. It was around this time that I discovered a Physical Therapist named Kelly Starrett. He was showing people how to recover from injuries and how to optimize their body’s function relative to certain movements. His free videos on YouTube inspired me to learn more about musculoskeletal anatomy and biomechanics. I was never the strongest or most athletic, but from 2009 when I first started doing Crossfit to 2014 when I stopped being a trainer, I made huge gains in my own ability because of the knowledge that I acquired. I was still struggling with periodic injuries but it wasn’t like any time before. Up until 2009, my knee pain had been chronic and while in the military I found myself regularly fighting through knee problems in order to complete training. By the time I was coaching other people I had made huge strides in resolving mechanical issues in my body. I had knowledge to share but I didn’t look the part, so people would ignore advice I was trying to give about various exercises. There were people who appreciated me as a coach but largely my advice would be ignored.
There were lots of people who were stronger than I was but didn’t move as well as I did. There were also people who were more athletic but couldn’t tell you how to become more athletic. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that there’s a difference between having the ability and knowing how to develop it. When I walked away from coaching I had the realization that people are always going to be attracted to ability first because that’s what we can see. That makes sense. We can’t see knowledge. When I left coaching I decided to focus on building my own ability and letting time do the rest. I’m starting to get the ‘How Old Are You?!’ question every now and again because people correlate my athleticism with someone much younger. I’m moving in the right direction.
If I never had to battle the injuries I’ve had, I can’t be sure that I would have this insatiable thirst to learn more about how my body works. The desire for athletic expression coupled with chronic injuries have made me curious and offered me the opportunity to learn. Anyone who moves their body on a regular basis will get injured from time to time. The challenge is doing the work to find sustainable long term solutions to injury (see this page for my articles on exercise which includes my process on injury recovery).
When I twisted my ankle all those years ago, I couldn’t walk properly for at least 2 weeks. I remember my ankle swelling up immediately after it happened. I never saw a Doctor or Physical Therapist about it. Also, this is somewhere between 1989 and 1991 when this happened. The ability to just hop on the internet and research ankle injuries and rehabilitation wouldn’t really become available until 1999 for me personally. By then, I had forgotten that I had even gotten injured so badly. By then I assumed my knee pain was purely related to being tall and overweight.
Had there been a sports physical therapist right there to give me the rehab plan and explain what was going on, I probably would have immediately become interested in the musculoskeletal system. I was already trying to understand strength development at the time. This may have changed my athletic destiny but it would have also taken away what has been a 30 plus year struggle to understand what is going on in my body. There is an elevated level of persistence that has come with not being given the answer early on.
I call these experiences beautiful pain and beautiful struggle because peace of mind is a beautiful thing. Sincere effort in pursuing a goal is marked by difficulty and obstacles. There is something that is magical about knowing you did your absolute best with the knowledge that you had, regardless of outcome. Yes, failure is still disappointing but failure in light of a lackadaisical effort is a bitter pill I have never had to swallow. Life has proven to me time and again that there is an abiding peace, even in massive disappointment, when you know you gave maximum effort.
This is wisdom that I would not have, had someone been there to remove the obstacles. If I had gone through a proper rehabilitation of my ankle and if I had coaches who helped me lose weight and get on a proper strength program, my athletic experience growing up would have been totally different. If you would have asked me then If I wanted that help, I’m fairly positive I would have told you, yes. However, not getting any direct help and fumbling my way to solutions as I struggled with chronic pain helped me develop a resilience and self-respect I wouldn’t trade for the experience of being a professional athlete. At almost 42 years old, it’s still my dream job but, cliche as it is to say, I wouldn’t trade my experiences for the world.
I Can Learn and Solve Problems
I mention it all the time. In today’s world we have access to some of the greatest minds on any particular topic, literally in the palms of our hands. I have read so many books on exercise and diet over the last 12 years or so. I have experimented with so many different protocols. I’ve been able to resolve so many issues on my own because knowledge is so available.
Do you have problems with snoring at night? I’ve read a book that addresses that and there’s a protocol I can suggest to you.
Do you have knee pain? If so, where is it located and when did it begin? I’ve read several books related to resolving musculoskeletal issues and there are several people I follow online who discuss the topic regularly.
What about neck and Back Pain? Refer to the previous answer.
I once had a client when I was a personal trainer that struggled with asthma. She knew I wasn’t a medical professional but she wondered if I had any advice. I told her to let me do some research and I found some breathing protocols for her to try. I don’t think she ever really followed through with it. She’d been asthmatic her whole life and the only protocol she knew led to relief was albuterol through her inhaler. The idea that consciously observing and altering her breathing patterns might be helpful, was inconceivable (asthma is scary, so the hesitation was understandable).
I’ve seen the same struggle with family and friends where it concerns weight loss. People struggle for so many years until eventually they believe it’s a genetic problem that can’t be solved. I fear that with the growing popularity of weight loss drugs like Ozempic, that more and more people are going to avoid doing research into lifestyle and habit change and simply accelerate to the belief that they have a genetic predisposition and medication/surgery is the only way out.
Wrestling with my own health has taught me how to research and problem solve. When I encounter an issue in my body, my first instinct is to research how that area of my body operates and look up strategies that others have used to resolve similar issues. I then begin to experiment. This works almost every time.
I had a coworker at my last job who was having shoulder problems. I kept telling him that the problem was his overall lack of activity and that he should do some regular stretching and maybe some light dumbbell exercises and it would go away. He insisted that he needed a doctor. He got physical therapy and the pain went away. He then went right back to his old sedentary habits and three months later the pain was back. This person was younger than me. I told them, “I go to an MMA gym every week where people 10-20 years younger than me are grabbing my limbs and trying to break them and wrapping their arms around my neck and trying to strangle me. I never have the issues you have. What’s the difference?” He knew the difference. I have invested lots of time and research in how to take care of my body. I spend lots of time maintaining and enhancing my body’s level of resilience through structured movement, aka – working out. I could tell him precisely what to do for rehab but he’s got to follow through and stay consistent.
But he was in pain and pain gives us tunnel vision. Pain can tell you a story that you are powerless to solve the issue. My journey has shown me repeatedly that there are so many things we can do to not only combat pain and illness, but to thrive physically. However, if I never had the obstacles… If I was never over 300 lbs… If I never had that ankle injury… If I never had back problems, I don’t know that the hunger to learn and understand my body would have been there. Fortunately, the obstacles were there and having those obstacles taught me that I wasn’t a victim, even though I was in some regards…
Your Whole Life Impacts Your Health
I am a victim of sexual and physical abuse. My older sister, whom I believed died with a very heavy heart, was the perpetrator of that abuse. I talk about this in more detail in my book but my experience at home as a child was very rough in many ways. My mother was struggling financially as a single mother. Neither my father nor my sister’s father were in the picture. My sister’s father had been very abusive to my mother. It was just the 3 of us and it was a sad household in many ways. I was little and at home with these two women who were larger and stronger than I was and who were struggling with their own demons. I spent my fair share of time at home getting verbally abused, physically abused, and at times sexually abused. Then I would go to school and get bullied. I can remember wondering why I was so scared of people back then and why other kids didn’t seem to have that issue. The source of my timidity and introversion back then are obvious now.
Long story short, bullying followed me at school all the way through highschool, except my senior year. Stress at home was present until I went off to college. College ended up being stressful in its own way as an Engineering Major. Then there is the dramatic turn my life took when I quit Engineering. Then there was the stress of military service and combat, which was healing in many ways but stressful for obvious reasons. We’re talking essentially 30 years of chronic stress. I’ve learned that this has an effect on not just your psychology, but very much on your physical body as well.
My back first gave out suddenly when I was a senior in highschool. I was going through warm ups at track practice (I was a shot put and discus thrower). It started again while I was in the military and it would become a chronic problem when I was a personal trainer just after leaving the service. My deep internal hip flexors (iliopsoas muscles) were stiff and tight. I worked daily at the gym to lengthen and stretch these muscles along with my whole body. I made huge strides in most places but I just couldn’t shake this issue with my back going out.
Eventually I heard David Goggoins story. Like me, he had grown up with a very traumatic childhood. He also entered the military and took on some of the most difficult training in three different service branches. He describes a period during his time in the Navy SEALS where his back started to give him issues and now he’s known for the long stretch sessions he does at night to help lengthen his hip flexors. Around this time a friend of mine from the gym began to share her story with me. Like myself and David Goggins, she had a very traumatic childhood. She was athletic but would run into issues with her back from time to time. Like me, it didn’t make sense if you only looked at how we moved and our diligence with stretching and mobility work. How were other people able to come in the gym and lift heavy weights with poor form and not have the back issues we were having?
I started to realize that the trauma of childhood and the stresses I had put myself through as an adult had imprinted on my body. Eventually I noticed that my back would give out when I had gone through an acutely high stress period in some part of my life. It wasn’t connected to anything I was doing physically. My back was giving out in relation to how my mind was interpreting my environment and processing stressful scenarios.
With help from Ben Patrick’s Programming and conscious effort to notice where and how I am carrying tension in my body, I haven’t had a back issue in almost 2 years. As opposed to my back going out every 3-4 months. I can still feel when the tension wants to rise in my hip flexors but mobility work and conscious relaxation is helping me to gain control of that. (I’m currently researching to better understand this connection between psychological stress and physical pain. Expect more writing on this in the future.)a
Now, all this said, if I hadn’t gone through the difficult experiences of my childhood, this is an insight I would not have. This of course goes well beyond fitness and speaks to the challenges of life as a whole. This is why I’m so insistent that I talk to people about their health but also about their whole life. How we manage health, personal finance, relationships, and work creates the soil that our minds and bodies are planted in, so to speak. I imagine that you want healthy soil to plant in, if you are reading this. That means we have to do hard work on those four areas to create environments where we can flourish.
Pain… A Good Thing
When My back first gave out in highschool I had been training for the outdoor track season. I was doing particularly well with the discus throw. I hadn’t had much training. That was going to be my first year doing it. It was the first time that I felt like I was excelling at something athletically. It wasn’t anything crazy but the head coach felt that if I could learn the technique, I might have a chance to compete against the 5A state champion. Then my back gave out at practice that one day and I wasn’t able to generate the same power I had before. Again, my eyes tear up as I write this. At 17 years old my legs and back were constantly betraying my effort and I didn’t know why. What could I have done, if I knew then, what I know now? How many of us have asked that question?
Later today I will go to train Jiu Jitsu at the MMA gym I attend. I will train hard and get everything out of my body today to honor all the struggles that my younger self had to endure. I’m grateful for every tear shed and all those heartbreaking moments that I had to carry because that pain gave me an opportunity to be a better man and a better human being. Would I have learned the lessons of character that I have today had I not gone through those struggles? Who knows.
I will come back to this idea many times, but this is why pain is a good thing. Pain is a buffer to our ego. Pain reminds us that we are fragile. Not that we should be ultra careful to avoid pain, but that we should be humble and shrewd to be ready to deal with pain, disappointment, and heartbreak. We should be ready to face pain with the confidence that we can make the choice to Adapt and Overcome.
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Travis Daigle 