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.

To Chase a Dream or Play it Safe: Part 1- Understanding your Motivation

The Wright brothers were able to crack the secret to powered
flight- not by resources or education, but by intrinsic motivation.

In the states, we are always taught to follow our dreams. Entrepreneurs and trailblazers are reserved a special kind of honor that transcends that of normal professions, and even among the ranks of those who haven't made it, there still remains a social respect for their having the courage to try. If not by our parents and friends then by society itself, you are always encouraged to chase your dreams at any cost, and that if you truly commit yourself to them, (no matter how unlikely) you can make it. As a function of this ideal, American culture is filled with stories of people who made the impossible a reality. Powered flight, footprints on the moon, the lightbulb, tablet PCs, the first world's first black president, and a great number of the world's largest and most powerful companies are all proud testaments to that fact.

At the same time however, if there is anything I have learned from having spent the past 14 years chasing after my own next-to-impossible dream, it's that there's a great deal of risk involved. Take the field that I work in for example. In the states, there are around 311 million people, and only around 120,000 - 130,000 unionized professional actors. That works out to about 3/10th of 1% of the population. For people who dream of being a pro-athlete, the figures are even more bleak. With only 17,000 people, the people who can make it as professional athletes only make up 5/100th of 1% of the population. Add in the fact that for Olympic athletes, even among those who make it, some bankrupt their families in the process and cause serious irreversible damage to their bodies on top of it, and the romantic ideal of chasing a dream seems well... a bit less romantic. Perhaps this is why in Asia, people aren't taught to chase their dreams as often. In just the opposite manner, parents and society usually teaches their kids to play it safe, and forego their dreams to work for large, established companies or in established job fields like medicine, law, or education. In doing so, their statistical chances of having a successful (and financially stable) life are substantially higher than their dream-chasing counterparts in the west.

Who is right? As is usually the case with any debate, both sides, and neither side. While there are great advantages (and pay-offs) to pioneering and dream-chasing, there are also great perils that go along with it. As such, to always tell people to "go for it" without educating them on the physical, mental, and financial risks involved, can be every bit as unhealthy as discouraging them from never even trying. If however, you, or someone you know is bound and determined to make your dream happen, then my next 5 blog entries are for you. In each one, Im going to discuss one of the elements that I feel is imperative to finding success despite the odds. Good luck, and may the force be with you.

1. Understand your motivation
When the Wright brothers set out to discover the secret of flight in 1903, they were not the only ones. Their chief competitor was named Samuel Langley. He was from Harvard, extremely well-educated, and worked at the Smithsonian. He was also fully funded by the US War Department, knew all the greatest minds of his time, and had the New York times following his efforts. The Wright brothers on the other hand, had no college education, and neither did anyone else on their team. Their only funding came from what they were making from their bicycle shop. They also had no media attention. But yet and still, it was the Wright brothers who cracked the equation, not Langley. Why? Because the Wright brothers sought to revolutionize the world. Langley just wanted the wealth and prestige of the discovery. So much so, that instead of using his funding to further their discovery, he quit the very same day they cracked it. He wanted the results of making the discovery, but didn't actually care about the discovery itself. Conversely, the Wright brothers had an intrinsic motivating force that burned in their souls so brightly that it pushed them past all odds, failures and obstacles. This, more than anything is what defines those who make it. They have a cause, an internal reason for doing what they do, and the results are, well, just a result of it. Those who don't make it on the other hand, even if they have everything else, often don't have that motivation.

In my own life, this principle manifested in the failure of my first goal of fighting in the 2004 Olympics for Taekwondo, and my relative success in my second goal of being an action actor. Even if I was driven enough, smart enough and tough enough or whatever else, the fact of the matter is, in the core of my soul, I never really cared about being the best fighter in the world. It took me a while to realize it, but what I really wanted was to be the best teacher. That intrinsic desire was what pushed me towards my major at university (communication, leadership, conflict management), my passion for languages (because the more I speak the more people I can reach) my travels to 33 countries in every corner of the globe (to study social issues), and even my love of film and cinema. (Through film you can reach hundreds of thousands- if not millions of people all at once).

Understanding your intrinsic motivation, and the concept of what Simon Sinek calls The Golden Circle will allow you to find a path that best suits you, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. Furthermore, to find success, you have to find people who believe in you; and what makes people believe in you is seeing that motivation manifesting in everything you do.

References:
http://www.nndb.com/people/670/000165175/
http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061007182955AAYvGuA
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_professional_actors_are_there_in_the_US

*stayed tuned for Part 2: Invest in Yourself. Coming soon!!