what injuries have you gotten and how did you adapt
uh so obviously active lifestyle you know growing up and
spending my life in the seal teams ton of injuries from everything i've had
mcl tear off sprained ankles shoulders wrists lower back elbows but the most
serious actual injury that i had um was i had neck i had neck surgery so i
had a frame anatomy in my neck which is they go in and they scrape
some bone away from the foramen which hurt bad when they did it and
but it's been really good um i was really i mean i had like lost
movement in my arm for a little while my right arm from your neck
from my neck injury just grinding over time and
and you know i remember there's one part of seal training
where you're carrying these boats on your head which is not that big of a
deal but then the instructors would jump from
boat to boats you get these 200 pound instructors and and they're just jumping
their boats on your head and they're jumping from boat to boat and
it's i remember an instructor jumping into the boat landing pretty much where
i was and i remember hearing a grinding noise
in my neck and i you know of course i was 19 years
old so i didn't care bring it on but uh they don't they don't
do that anymore they actually don't jump from boat to boat anymore which is which
is cool they shouldn't because it's not good for
you so but but anyways with all these injuries
whether it's mcl tear whether it's you know high ankle sprains and
and all kinds of ligament damages in my in my ankles and my
lower back which i've injured a few times mo almost all muscular there uh
what i do is i do the same thing with all of them and that is i do whatever i
can you know if i if i when i hurt my knee
and i couldn't squat i could do like a quarter squat
i did a quarter squats you know i'd go out the garage and i'd stand there with
no body weight and just do quarter squats and get the blood moving
and you know then i'd try and do my other body parts and
you know could do pull-ups still and so i did dead-hand pull-ups because i
couldn't even move my knee to like kept at all so i did what i could there
you know so you can't do ring dips do regular dips if you can't do dips do
push-ups you can't do push-ups push off of a wall whatever it takes to
get something done you can't lift that 40-kilogram
kettlebell lift the 24 kilogram kettlebell just do
something move get the blood in there and not only get the blood in there
because i always think that the more you're moving and the more you're
using that range of motion the faster you're gonna heal
you know you're just circulating more repairing nutrients to your body
so it would make sense to me that that's going to help you heal
now of course you can re-damage you can go worse you know
if it hurts to do a quarter squat and so you do half squat
you're going backwards yeah you know so you want to stay within the range of
motion when you're not re-entering it or making it worse so
don't be stupid but do
get the movement going and also i don't know what i would do
mentally if i like couldn't do anything at all now when i hurt my neck though i
was i was laid up i didn't think i was gonna be i was just gonna power through
it like a tough guy yeah no i was laid up with my
head and it just hurting and but i'll tell you as soon as i could get
up and start trying to walk around i did it and
like i said try to try to stay sane and then the other thing that happens is
when you have these injuries you know you're you got to adapt your
goals you know and you guys got to set new goals okay
you know and and really i've never really fully regained the strength in my
right arm and my right pec it's not as strong as
it was and it's definitely way weaker than my
other side you know it's probably at 70 or 80 percent okay and you know i
just have to say okay well what can i do it's like okay you're
going to be no you're a normal human now you know so so here's what here's here's
here's what your new goals are and i'm you know i'm still
trying to improve and get better at whatever it is but you
know injuries are going to happen in life
and you got to just do the best you can to work through them
as smartly as you possibly can and kind of to add to the
the train smart this may seem obvious but when you do
like higher rep like heavier weight or not higher up sorry heavier weight um
lower reps or real explosive stuff you're gonna be
more prone to injury so even being just more conscious of your
movement yeah and and really avoiding those types of
movements when you feel an injury start to come on like if you get a little
lower back thing or a shoulder thing oh for sure
um just be conscious of your movement way more today i was dead lifting and i
i was like nope okay we're done dead lifting for
the day yeah and and you know i definitely spared myself
being laid up you know and i just got out the roller
and just grind it out for a while got out the ball
grounded out for a while but for sure you got to listen you got to pay
attention and if you feel that little twinge it's
no big deal you know there's plenty of other ways to get your
to get your workout on besides jack and the big steel so
yeah and you um like how you were saying bodyweight squats you'll just do it you
know like if you're if you had a sick squat workout planned and you feel
your lower back or your it bend is a big one where when you
when you get after it in squats that'll um a lot of times act up well i sprained
my ankle sick enough probably four or five months
ago and it i couldn't do it was weird it's one of those weird
things i couldn't do overhead squats but i could do overhead like after a
snatch yes i couldn't do overhead squats
because it hurt my ankle for whatever reason yeah but i could do front squats
and regular squats and i couldn't go to full the ones i
could still go to full depth on again i don't know why i'm not a physician
front squats felt the best so i started doing more and more front squats at the
time and and then eventually you know and now i'm
back to doing everything so figure out what you can get away with
figure out what you can do and do it also when in regards to being conscious
of like your movement a lot of times i know this is this is the case for me
where i'll get little injuries from just like
racking or unracking weights just because it's like well maybe i need to
do more functional training my friends i don't always get injured but no it's
it's just little things you know because that a lot of times that is like
it's unconscious i'm just put this over here
you know and you're not meanwhile if you do a
cleaning jerk you're like okay i'm going to focus on this good technique
so again that goes along with being careful of your
movement being being conscious of it yeah especially when you feel
when you hit that fatigue when you know you've been working out for three weeks
straight hard very little rest you're running you know
and you start to feel these little things come about
i think it's important to to to be conscious of those yes
and also to what you were saying earlier if my head's not in the game i'm not
jacking the big weights yeah because you've got
to be thinking about it you got to be thinking about your body position
you know before you do before before you just try and grab on this big weight and
throw it around yeah you got to get your head in the
game