2014: My Road to a 200% Recovery

A full year's recovery later...The strongest and most fit I've ever been.

So, as all of you who read my blog regularly know, at the beginning of 2013, I contracted the EB Virus on a film set, and it rocked my body to all hell. Liver and kidney dysfunction, tonsillitis, 107 degree fever, the list goes on and on, and I won't bother to get into it here.

 Usually an EB Virus infection (much like when people get Mono in college) takes about 6 months to get over, and unfortunately some people never fully recover at all. By looking up the symptoms and their individual causes, and then aggressively attacking them one by one (cranberry juice to increase kidney function, copious amounts of yogurt and protein shakes to bring up white blood cell count, Bufferin as a fever breaker, etc), I managed to beat the symptoms and more or less return to normal in 2 weeks flat.

 Unfortunately, I also lost a lot of muscle mass, (and strength) and my body was so weak from the process that I tore a rotator cuff in my left shoulder putting on a jacket. Then while recovering from that, I destroyed the soft tissue in the back of my knee while working (which put me on crutches for 2 months). Then as a function of my not using my left arm for so long, the muscle atrophied, and my arm actually shrank. (Even more so than the rest of me after the infection). Needless to say, it was a rough year.

 While I was in the midst of dealing with all that though. I sore to myself and to whatever powers that be, that I would not just recover, but come back stronger than I ever have been in my life. In effect, I promised myself that in 2014, I would make a 200% recovery...and and it took me a full year, but here is how I did it.

 In the interest of keeping things short, I won't get into how I beat the EB Virus so quickly, as I've already written extensively about that in this blog. (Click to check it out here, if you want or need info on that.)

Part 1: Rebuilding the left arm and shoulder

 In terms of recovering from the shoulder injury, the first and most important step was committing myself to rehab, and then sticking with it, session after session, week after week, month after month until I had more or less all of the flexibility back. As aforementioned though, as a function of not using the arm, it also atrophied and shrank down in size considerably compared to the functioning right arm. Basically, even if I was getting flexibility gains back, it became so much weaker, without my even knowing it, I just stopped using it, further exasperating the problem...until I noticed how much smaller and thinner it was.

As such, step 2 was committing myself to using that arm for absolutely everything (but particularly carrying things) until it was back to a basic level of strength. In order to get the size back, next I committed myself to breaking my high school push-up record of 93 in a minute. To do this, 3 times a week, before bed, I would simply do as many push-ups as I could in a minute. At the time, I knew nothing about proper push-up form, and my technique was horrible...but I stuck with it until I broke 103, beating the record by ten.

 Here is the video of the process:


Part 2: Rebuilding the Knee
After that, it was time to repeat the process with knee. When my mother was still a practicing doctor, she told me about a cop she worked on, who completely destroyed his knee on the job, but loved his job, and was bound and determined to get back to it. She said it took him a year to do it, but with concentrated effort, he made a full recovery, passed all the strength requirements and was able to return to work without losing a step.

 While I had never met him, (or even learned his name) with that police officer as my inspiration, I knew that despite what everyone says, it is possible to make a complete recovery from a knee injury, and I would accept nothing less. Thankfully, I could go to the same place I went to for my shoulder, and the physical therapist could work on both during the same sessions. Once I could walk, even with a heavy limp, I just started walking on it. I started to get around without the crutches as much as I could without risking further injury, strain, or inflammation.

 I followed the home exercises my PT gave me to a tee, always ate well, rested a lot, and slept well, and recovery was smooth and even. Unfortunately, I was also offered three of the coolest stunt jobs in my career during that recovery, and doing them all back to back really took it's toll. As such, the knee recovery look a lot longer than that of the shoulder...but at this point, I can run and kick again, and as an indicator of my rehab's success, I set out to not just get my old physical stunt skills, but also develop new ones.

And here is a sample of a few of them. I couldn't do either of these techniques before the knee injury.


Part 3: Rebuilding Muscle Mass
 The last element to making the recovery was getting all of my muscle mass back, and then going beyond anything I have ever had. To do this, I enlisted the help of my good friend, Joe Almani, an actor and model friend who stayed with me in Tokyo for two weeks, who is also a certified personal trainer. Through Joe's exercises, and diet, I was able to not just get my strength back to what it was...but actually come back much stronger.

Here are the links to those vids as well:


 In any event, I am not writing this to brag or boast about my physical abilities, character strength, or achievements. I am writing this to share with people a simple fact I discovered: your body is YOUR body. It is an adaptable canvas, and you can choose the type of picture you paint on it. If you wanna paint a sad picture on it, you can give up on it; listen to nay-sayers or accept the idea that other people or other people's body is "just stronger". If you want to paint a beautiful picture however, it's just a matter of realizing that while every canvas has it's limits, it is still your canvas for the painting... And what I discovered, is that with careful and dedicated effort, even a broken or torn canvas can still create a work of art.