Piggybacking: I DID Change The Way I Move…

Categories: Blog Oct 21, 2015

I wanted to piggyback off Piers Kwan’s guest post on Monday. Piers suggested that you don’t have to feel or be clumsy. And that Original Strength is your solution.

He’s absolutely 100% right. 

I have lived it.

When I was a child, I started school a year early. I was always the youngest and smallest in my class. Sometimes that’s not a problem, especially if a child is athletically gifted. I was not. I was OK at best at shooting a basketball, but football? Forget it. Couldn’t throw a spiral and couldn’t catch the ball - it would always bounce out of my hands. As a result I was routinely picked in the bottom three for any team sport. It turns out I had very poor hand-eye coordination. 

Therefore, I gravitated towards sports without balls - running, wrestling, weightlifting. Unfortunately, even those sports presented me with seemingly unconquerable challenges: Chronic knee pain running; only being able to comfortably take a shot on one side of my opponent’s body while wrestling and not being able to figure out how to do the same move on the other side; and chronic musculoskeletal injuries while weightlifting. 

Then, the proverbial wheels fell off.

In 2005, after two relatively serious lower back injuries in the previous six years, and nursing a knee injury from wrestling, I injured my right hip. Later that year I injured my left hip. In January of 2006, I could barely move and suffered severe and chronic pain in both knees. So much so, that I couldn’t even sit down in a chair - I had to “plop” and use my arms to get out.

For the next four years, until early 2010, I had glimmers of hope of returning to the life I once enjoyed - one of lifting heavy weights over my head, but nothing “stuck.” I’d have glimmers of hope - even entered a weightlifting meet back in 2007, but shortly after, things started going wrong again. 

Then I started using Original Strength in April 2010, “bulletproofing” as we called it back then. I noticed immediate changes.

Most notably was I was more comfortable in my own body - things just felt smoother. And then, without really being aware of it - the near miraculous started happening.

I could catch a football without it bouncing off my hands. And I could throw a spiral. And both of them routinely, after 38 years of not being able to do so. My hand-eye coordination dramatically improved. One of my clients, who I trained out of his office gym, was a baseball catcher when he was young. As a result, he loved throwing balls to me, which were really at me. I couldn’t catch them if my life depended on it. Then, one day, he threw a tennis ball to me and my back was partially turned. I saw the ball out of my left eye and reached up and picked it out of the air with my left hand. At that point we had been training for 10 years or and that moment was his “buy in” to Original Strength. 

Now I can run and jump pain free and even athletically (instead of robotically). And as a result of Original Strength - backward crawling specifically - I gained a bodyweight rock-bottom single leg squat, a one-arm-one-leg push up, and even a muscle up - all at a bodyweight of around 205 pounds. 

The best part is now I have kids and at 42, I can run, jump, and roll around with them, pain free and athletically. 

I truly believe that with Original Strength as your foundation, there isn’t anything you can’t do. (Except defy the laws of physics.)

You can reverse the clock and be as young as you want to.

That’s my story and it’s not over yet by a long shot. There are plenty of physical adventures I have left to live in my renewed, restored body.

What story will you write about yourself?

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