Over a dozen orthopedic surgeries
throughout his football career.
And he said, when you get to the NFL, everybody
is that guy that you didn't wanna get hit by.
This doctor told him Your painful hip, your right hip
is so bad in this x-ray.
And then he said there was a running joke the night
before training camp opened.
We would say, enjoy tonight.
This is as good as you're going to feel
until the season ends.
Today I am sharing this story of bk, a former NFL player
and a former client of mine from many years ago.
In today's story, we're going to hear about what it takes
to become an NFL player
and what it's like to be an NFL player
and what it's like to be an NFL player.
After you're done playing in the big leagues,
you're gonna hear about injuries,
you're gonna hear about the approach to dealing
with injuries during the season.
And in the off season, you're gonna hear about what happens
with all those injuries when you retire from football
and what it's like to try to manage your body thereafter.
There are some really fascinating points that BK makes.
There are some fascinating insights
that you can get from hearing an elite level athlete talk
about the injuries he's had from traumatic collisions
and also the injuries he started to get
after playing when he's just at home resting,
not getting beat upon by 300 pound animals.
I have his story in a written form here.
We did an email interview years ago
and I just never got around to making a video about it.
But I think it's really important,
especially since the Super Bowl just passed, for people
to hear the perspective of somebody who was in the NFL
and who himself has dealt with massive amounts
of pain all over his body.
I want you to hear his perspectives
'cause they'll help you with hip pain, back pain,
shoulder pain, and they'll help you understand some
of the issues that come up with painkillers
and orthopedic surgeries.
So if you're ready, let's get ready to think right,
move right and feel right.
This football player, um, we're not giving his real name,
I'm just gonna call him bk and that's gonna be it.
Those are not even his real initials,
but I think bk,
for whatever reason back then, made a lot of sense.
So I worked with a lot of people over the years.
I worked with professional baseball players, I worked with
a couple NFL players, some semi-pro people.
When I was in San Diego, I worked with Navy Seals.
And I will tell you that the one thing
that is clear from elite level athletes is
that they are able to deal with pain.
They just turn off their, their receptors.
They just don't pay attention to their pain.
And it is amazing what they can do when they are just in
that mode of like, I'm gonna do this.
I don't care if it hurts. I don't care
where it hurts, I'm just doing it.
So, bks story, um, this whole thing
that I'm reading is from a typed
up interview I did with him.
So I actually sent him questions
and he just wrote down his answers for me.
And then we put it up on the blog post.
If you wanna read it, I will link
to it in the description box.
You can check it out after this video is done.
So first of all, let's talk about what, uh,
what it was like to get to the NFL.
So, um, I asked him, how did you end up in the NFL
and what should people know about life in the NFL?
And so he said, I've been active in sports
my whole life as a child.
I played soccer, basketball, baseball, and flag football.
When I got to high school, I started playing tackle football
and was able to earn an athletic scholarship
to continue playing football.
In the PAC 12 conference.
After my collegiate career,
I was drafted into the National Football League.
So obviously in athletes, um,
he says there are some pretty significant differences
between the NFL and lower levels of football.
First football is much faster and more physical.
In the NFL, there are some huge strong human beings
that move fast on the football field.
And second, the NFL season can be about twice as long
as the collegiate football season.
And, uh, this actually, oh, here we go.
Reminds me of a story I wanna share.
And then he said there was a running joke the night
before training camp open.
We would say, enjoy tonight.
This is as good as you're going to feel
until the season ends.
Woo hoo. Sounds great. Right?
So this actually, uh, reminds me of
a conversation I had either with BK
or with another football player, but I think it was with bk.
And he told me, um, you know,
when you're playing high school football, you're getting
hit pretty hard and there's on every team there's one guy
who can hit harder than anybody else,
and you don't want to get hit by that guy.
And then when you get to college level,
there's one guy on every team
that can hit harder than anybody else
and you don't wanna get hit by that guy.
And he said, when you get to the NFL, everybody
is that guy that you didn't wanna get hit by.
The whole league is those guys.
And I remember hearing that in that conversation
and just thinking, okay, that's pretty dramatic
and it sounds terrible and there's a reason why you don't
see, uh, small guys like me in the NFL.
So, uh, next question I asked him was,
how frequently did you encounter injuries in the NFL
and how were player injuries dealt with?
In the NFL, almost every player suffers an injury,
usually multiple injuries during the season.
The players and medical staff do the best they can
to rehab the injuries,
but usually players have to rely on anti-inflammatory
and pain medications to get through the season.
We would try to rehab injuries during the season,
but it was an uphill battle since we often would re-injure
whatever was hurting when we played the game.
Injuries and soreness would accumulate during the season.
There wasn't time built into the schedule
to prevent or address injuries.
Instead, players would come into practice early
and stay late to address injury concerns.
If the injury lingered into the off season,
then surgery was performed to address the injury
and to try to get the player ready for the following season.
After a few years, the pattern was really obvious to me.
Players suffer injuries limp through the season
with the assistance of medication
and then a two tuneup in the operating room
during the off season in order to be ready
for training camp the following year.
So this is a pretty clear, um, illustration of
that whole elite athlete mentality and ability, right?
This ability to just say, I'm gonna play through the pain.
It doesn't matter where, it doesn't matter
how much it hurts, I'm just gonna get through this.
Uh, I'll take some pain pills, numb it,
and boom, let's go, let's do this.
Of course, a very large salary rise on this.
Of course your livelihood rise on this.
Um, but it takes a very particular,
uh, mental fortitude to be able to say, I'm going
to destroy myself physically to make this happen.
And I know I don't have that
and I know, well, I might have it under the right
circumstances, but, um, playing a sport, I don't have it.
I just don't have it. Maybe if it,
if it were my son's life at risk, maybe I would have it,
but I, I don't know.
Next I asked bk, well,
what did medical professionals advise you
to do to solve your problems?
And he said, like I said, basically we managed the injuries
until the off seasons.
We got anti-inflammatories, pain meds,
and then we would just play through the injuries
and surgery in the off season if things
were still lingering.
And so I asked, what were the results
of implementing these medicinal surgical solutions?
And BK said, no,
I'm not sure if I would call this cycle a solution.
It was just a pattern of behavior we saw and bought into,
and unfortunately it became the norm.
Some of the problems could be anticipated.
I understood that I would likely have aches
and pains later in life,
but I'm not sure I understood the severity
of these symptoms while I was playing.
Can you imagine getting hit by a truck of a human being over
and over and over again?
Don't you think your body would fall apart?
I I mean, if, like, if you hit me once, once
I, I'd probably be permanently
injured for the rest of my life.
Like one 300 pound, uh, football player hitting me would,
if I survive it, I'm gonna suffer some issues, right?
Other symptoms were completely unanticipated.
I have several teammates that are suffering kidney problems
because medications were so heavily prescribed by the teams,
we didn't know the risks of the long term use
of these medications.
That's pretty darn important to understand
because there are problems with painkillers
and taking them a lot, certain painkillers,
like a sen if you take a lot
of just one time can cause some pretty bad
damage to your body.
So taking all these medications long term to numb the pain
and play through the pain can be pretty bad.
So then I asked him, uh,
what were your problems like in recent years
and what was your hip pain like?
Because BK came to see me mostly because of hip pain.
And he said, after more than a dozen orthopedic surgeries
during my high school, college
and NFL career, I thought my days of dealing
with injuries were behind me.
Over the course of the last couple years,
I noticed a burning pain in my right hip
that's steadily increased.
So let's just highlight over
a dozen orthopedic surgeries throughout his football career.
And he, you know, got through things with those surgeries.
But then after he retired from football,
he started getting hip pain.
So then he said, as the pain got worse,
I found myself sitting to rest my hip instead
of living the active life lifestyle I was used to.
At first, please pay attention here.
At first, the sitting seemed to help calm the flaring pain.
After a few months, my right hip pain intensified
and it felt as if the sitting would make the pain worse.
Now, I have made videos about hip pain while sitting.
And I have talked about this so many times.
You cannot sit your way out of hip pain.
You cannot rest out of hip pain.
Similarly, if you have back pain, you cannot just lie in bed
and expect the back pain to magically resolve.
Yes, that was medical advice over the last many decades,
but it has been shown to be completely wrong.
There is a narrow window of time in which yeah,
you probably need to rest
and just kind of like gently treat your body with compassion
and not move too hard.
But that's a narrow window.
And in order to rebuild function, you need to be moving.
You cannot just sit
and sitting in terms of hip pain kills your butt muscles,
it kills your hamstrings, it kills your hip muscles,
which results in more hip pain.
So back to bk, I tried my best to manage my hip issues
by unsuccessfully balancing what I needed to do
during the day, while also trying to rest frequent visits
to the visits to the chiropractor
and massage therapist did little to help manage the pain
that just kept getting worse.
Soon I found myself spending too much time on the couch
because being on my feet caused extreme pain.
So perfect example rests leads to atrophy and atrophy aches.
I struggled to sleep at night
because of the intense burning sensation in my hip.
I just couldn't find a position
that made me comfortable enough to sleep soundly.
Even with little sleep, I would rush
to get outta bed in the morning 'cause at least moving
around would distract me from the hip pain I was
enduring while lying in bed.
My hip issue was quickly becoming intolerable.
I had no interest in adding to my already long list
of surgeries and wanted to exhaust all my options
before consulting with an orthopedic surgeon, which
that I believe is a good idea, right?
So, um, he found a doctor
who specialized in non-operative orthopedics
and he made an appointment.
And, uh, his pain, he said was
so intense he was counting down the days, um,
to when he could see the doctor.
Hey, I just wanna take a quick second to say thank you
to Joseph for the $50 donation via YouTube.
Super. Thanks. I'm glad that my videos were able to help you
with your neck pain when chiropractors
and massage therapists couldn't.
And I'm really thankful for your support of my channel.
If you're watching this and you wanna support my channel
too, go to upright health.com/donate
for all these simple, easy options.
You can donate via my website or you can donate via PayPal
and that will mean fewer fees for me.
I appreciate whatever way you wanna support me.
Your donations make it possible for me
to make videos like this without also having
to make commercials for VPNs and website builders
and weird vitamin supplements and all that stuff.
So thank you so much. Let's get back to the video Now,
of course I'm interested.
No, what did that hip doctor say?
What did that orthopedic say?
So he went to the doctor hopeful that the doctor
who spent more than 20 years practicing nonsurgical methods
would help me put together a plan to reduce my hip pain,
hip pain, regain some activity and avoid surgery.
So what did the doctor do?
The doctor ordered x-rays
of my hips when I first arrived for my appointment.
When I met with a doctor, she reviewed my films
and immediately stated my right hip was too damaged
to fix even through surgery.
She did, however, write me a referral to see a hip surgeon
for my pain-free left hip.
So just to be clear, so you understand that
this doctor told him your painful hip, your right hip
is so bad in this x-ray,
there's nothing anybody can do about it,
but your left hip looks like it could use some surgery
to prevent it from getting as bad as the right hip,
even though your left hip doesn't hurt.
And so the doctor promised me
that my left hip would soon feel as bad
as my right hip if I didn't immediately have surgery so much
for non-operative orthopedics.
I left the office discouraged
and convinced I would need surgery.
So this happens,
and I think it's very important for people to un people
to understand this non-orthopedic specialists,
you would hope have some toolbox for you
that would help you avoid surgery.
I actually had a very similar experience.
They don't seem in my experience
and from this story to have tools
to help you avoid the surgery.
So I actually went to a sports medicine, uh, doctor
to look at my hips and I actually did this after my hips.
I had gotten my hips better,
I exercised and made them feel better.
But then I went to a sports medicine doctor to see
what would happen if I said, Hey, like,
what happens if we do an MRI
and what are your opinions about my hips?
And he actually looked at my MRI
and he said, well, it looks like you have early art,
early signs of like arthritis in your thirties.
That's really bad. That means you should stop moving,
stop exercising, don't do anything with any sort of impact.
Don't lift weights, don't stretch,
don't literally the worst advice possible.
And I should make another video about this.
He, the way he did his movement tests on me
and the the hip test, hip mobility tests was,
it was mindbogglingly bad.
And this was, this was a sports medicine doctor,
a a specialist in non-operative.
It's just mind-boggling sometimes.
Anyway, BK says, I dreaded the thought
of treating my current hip issues the way I managed
injuries during my football career.
I wanted to avoid pain meds, cortisone injections,
and most of all surgery.
The hip surgeon I was referred to was so busy.
His soonest available
appointment was two and a half months away.
Apparently a lot of people are told they need hip surgery.
He adds in a parenthetical.
Now, I needed to find a way to cope with my pain
for the next 75 days until I could finally see the surgeon.
Even though I reduced my level of activity, I now had a sore
and cracking right knee to go along with my aching hip pain.
My friends started to joke that it was impossible for me
to sneak up on anyone
because the loud cracking in my joints gave away my presence
from 50 feet away.
Also, he, he's over six feet tall
and you can probably feel him
'cause he's a football player, right?
Just kidding. That's a joke.
bk, if you end up seeing this, please. I'm just kidding.
Don't hurt me. Okay, so then, um, I asked him
what have been the results of training at Upright Health?
Uh, he came to Upright Health to try to get some help,
and he said, I've learned a whole new way of thinking about
how to treat and prevent injuries.
Most importantly, I've learned
that surgery is not the only way
to correct a nagging painful injury.
Um, our bodies having miraculous ability to heal themselves
that I didn't fully comprehend.
Of course, there are some injuries like a torn ACL
that require surgery to repair.
There are many other injuries that we can get relief from
that do not require surgery.
The most memorable experience I've had training
with Upright Health was the first time I walked down my
stairs after getting out of bed without needing
to hang onto the railing as tight as possible.
That was a good day.
And so I asked him, what can you do
now that you couldn't do before?
What's been the most surprising thing for you?
And he said, during my first visit, we did soft tissue work,
stretching and strengthening.
And I noticed a big change in my level of pain during
that first appointment, but wasn't convinced
that the results would last.
Great. Okay, so I just wanna highlight this.
I am not a magician. I'd have no magic powers.
I'm not telling anybody that I am a magical
messiah of muscles.
Although having just said those words out loud, I'd like
to maybe start calling myself a messiah of muscles.
If you like the way that sounds, you can comment down below.
Anyway, um, this stuff requires you
to be skeptical and critical.
If you're trying to fix your body, you wanna test things
and see what's actually working for you,
and then test to make sure it keeps working for you.
So I have had many things work
for me at one point in my life,
and then I need to change it at some point
because either my activity levels, my habits, my lifestyle,
something changes, and then I just have to adjust
how I treat my body myself.
I I can't just say like, oh, massaging,
this always fixes it.
I can't just say, um, stretching. This always fixes it.
I can say right now, in this period of time,
this is what's seeming to work,
but that may not always be the root
cause of the issue, right?
So also, when you go to see any sort of health expert,
whether it's a chiropractor, massage therapist,
whatever trainer, physical therapist, you want
to be thinking about whether you're getting
what you really want, which is long-term relief
and the ability to manage it yourself.
And so that's why this skepticism, I I
warmly welcomed from bk anyway, he said,
the results I did get while working with Matt
that first day served as motivation for me to continue, um,
with a program he wrote for me on my own at home.
Within a week, I noticed I was sleeping better.
So again, not a muscle messiah, messiah of muscles,
but I have seen
and experienced enough hip pain while sleeping to know that,
you know, there's, there's some patterns that you can try,
some things you can do that are probably gonna help.
I even made a video. I have a whole blog post on this,
so I'll link to that later.
Anyway, the most memorable experience I've had training
with Matt at Upright Health was the first time I walked down
my stairs after getting outta bed without needing
to hang onto the railing as tight as possible.
In the morning, I used to worry about my knees giving out
while going down my stairs.
And this first day I was able to do that without worry.
Um, I knew I was on the right track.
Since that day, I've been,
I've seen steady progress in decreasing my levels of pain
and increasing my levels of activity.
The progress isn't always linear.
It for, for most people isn't,
and it takes some trial and error.
But when I look back to where I started, to where I am now,
I know I have made significant progress.
And finally, I asked him,
how have your results affected your view of
how the NFL deals with player injuries?
And he says, it seems ridiculous now.
It's a cycle that needs to be broken.
I now realize that if we value health,
if we value our ability to be active,
that we should think about injury treatment in a much better
way than turning to surgery as one of the first options.
This doesn't just apply to the NFL, it applies to our entire
healthcare system.
And one final quote, I've had some amazing results.
Rehabbing injuries that I was told would require surgery.
I understand some injuries require surgery,
but I would encourage everyone to try out non-surgical means
of addressing an injury
before being wheeled into an operating room.
So, bk, thank you so much years ago for taking the time
to, um, share your story with me.
I put into a blog post.
I remember I emailed it to some of my newsletter at
that time, but it's been years
and I just stumbled across this.
And I hope that it is as helpful as
it should be to many, many people.
Like the, the story here is incredible, right?
You have somebody who's an elite athlete getting
absolutely destroyed, getting surgery after surgery,
after surgery, and then
after retiring, still having more problems crop up.
And those problems aren't cropping up
because of traumatic injury, but rather
because of atrophy, it's hugely important that you
recognize that your body can hurt both
because of traumatic injury and
because of just the accretion of atrophy.
You are accumulating more
and more atrophy by doing nothing, by sitting around,
by trying to rest and resting more can make things much
worse because stories show you that even a win,
you are just jacked up from being hit
and hammered all the time.
You can still make some things,
feel a whole lot better if you take the time
and if you look at things with a critical eye.
And don't just surrender yourself to the idea that you got
to have somebody else fix it for you.
So I hope that this has been inspiring for you.
I hope that it's helpful for you
and I hope it gives you really interesting, um,
perspective on what it's like
to be an elite athlete in the NFL and what it's like
after life in the NFL.
If you would like more free videos to help you
with your body, to help you with your mind,
be sure to check these out here.
If you wanna support this channel, go
to upright health.com/donate, share, subscribe,
and go to my website to get a free course
to make your body feel a whole lot better.
As always, I hope you remember that pain sucks.
Life shouldn't.
