The Swimmer

I’ve been involved in athletics from the age of 5, first with soccer, then switching over full-time to swimming at the age of 12. From the start of my swimming career through high school, I set over a dozen club records, 4 Florida state records, and had numerous top-16 finishes nationally.

In high school I was recruited to swim at Villanova. As a freshman I finished 7th at the Big East Championship. Unfortunately, during my sophomore year I had to have my tonsils removed, which kept me out of the pool. At  the beginning of my junior year I broke a rib swimming in practice, and essentially my swimming career was over.

I found out that I had osteopenia (decrease in bone density) in my lumbar spine and ribs, which led to me being the first known person to ever break a rib due to swimming. Doctors ran all the normal tests, and everything came back normal. That was the end of their caring about my osteopenia. They prescribed medication, and I would get a bone scan every two years to make sure it wasn’t getting worse.

Do consider that for 14 years of my life, I swam roughly 12 miles a day, every day. I abused my body, and it wasn’t only my bone density that was trashed; my shoulders would never be 100% again.

Since my swimming career ended in my early 20s, I became very active at the gym lifting weights, running, and rowing. The more I trained, the more I noticed that my arms were developing while my chest and back were not. Before I knew it, I was developing bicep, shoulder, and lower back issues.

Back to the doctors I went. I was diagnosed with blunting of the labrum and bicep tendinosis. The labrum is a ring of fibrocartilage which increases surface area of the shoulder joint. Blunting is a degeneration or breakdown of this otherwise smooth surface. Before I knew it, In 2007 I had sub-acromial decompression surgery performed on my left shoulder and a lot of physical therapy. I even had nerves burned away twice in my lumbar spine, in 2009 and 2010, due to severe pain. These procedures helped with the pain but never resolved the underlying problem, and it didn’t change my results in the gym.

When I met Michael, he was the first one to actually care about my situation and dig into what could have been the root cause. Like most people, I had the mindset of just masking the issue with medication and surgery. That was the normal thing to do. I never considered investigating what could be causing all this to occur.  

Michael opened my mind to the idea that it’s not normal for the body to be in pain, to require multiple surgical procedures, and have to pop pain killers everyday to get by.  

My body had reached its breaking point. After telling Michael about my injuries, he quickly knew that something was wrong with how I was doing the exercises, how I was moving. My body had begun to let me know that something had to change, but I wasn’t really listening. Fortunately, Michael was–and I listened to him.

What Michael discovered was that my posture was out of alignment, my core was dysfunctional, and my extremities were trying to pick up the slack, and it wasn’t working out very well. When I was exercising, I was using mostly my arms. I was subconsciously ignoring my torso, and my joints were taking the brunt of the stress.  

Working with Michael once a week, I became more self-aware. I learned not only how to move correctly but how to exercise without further harming myself. It wasn’t just that I learned where my limits were; I have gotten stronger and, more importantly, more balanced. My mechanics have improved greatly by learning how to use my “Inner Unit” (or core) and to then integrate that with my torso. I have significantly increased my shoulder stability and have learned to use my torso rather than powering through everything with my arms. I have even made tremendous gains in my back and chest musculature that I never thought possible. I thought I was past my peak.  

To be honest, I am not 100% pain free in the shoulders and likely never will be considering the trauma and damage inflicted. While I can’t do normal pull-ups, upright rows, or hammer curls, I am okay with that. I have come to realize that exercises are one thing, but what the body really responds to is movement, and I can say that I am moving so much better now. While I do have some limits, they are few in the scheme of things. Ultimately, I know that Michael has extended my active lifestyle by decades, and working with him has been one of the biggest blessings of my life.

While Michael and I initially focused on the physical aspects of movement, he also took into consideration other aspects of my health. Since starting my corporate career, I was the one at work who was always hungry, always eating. It was so unusual that everyone at work would joke about it.

Michael recognized that something was not right with my diet. To address this, he guided me through the Metabolic Typing® process. I found out which foods were best for me to eat and when to eat them. It worked so well for me that I am now snack free between breakfast and lunch, and from lunch until my workday ends. Now that I call a miracle!

We had even started looking into metabolic dysfunction or what he calls “Metabolic Chaos®”. We made some interesting discoveries regarding digestive issues, hormone imbalances, and my body’s occasional difficulty in adapting to or resolving stress. This understanding further increased my self-awareness and understand why the body was behaving in a manner at odds with my intentions and effort. Ultimately, know what I now know I am training smarter and having greater gains in the gym. As that is getting away from my personal training experience, I will leave that part of my story for another time.