Upright Health

Climbing around on rocks can teach you unexpected things about life and about yourself.

Partial Transcript: Hey, everybody! It's Matt Hsu from Upright Health and welcome to Episode 16 of the Upright Health Podcast. Today, I’m going to be talking with about two lessons I learned while climbing on rocks. I’m going to keep this pretty short because I am short on time these days. I have been working, as you may know, very hard on the FAI Fix.

That is an e-book supplemented with a ton of videos to help you troubleshoot pain, discomfort and mobility problems with your hips, so that you can get your life back again. This is a project that I've been working on for quite a while and I'm very excited that it's almost done. It's looking like it’s going to be done by the end of March like I had planned. And I'm really excited by the prospects of being able to help so many people: (1) understand that surgery is probably not a good answer for hip pain and hip mobility problems; and (2) to help people solve that problem. So look out for that. The website is not complete but I will share that with you when it is good and ready, so keep your ears open for that. Now, a couple weeks ago, I went with a couple friends to go run around some rocks and jump around on boulders and just climb around like a bunch of ten year olds. We had a spectacular time. We were just sprinting around, jumping up and down on rocks, climbing rocks. It wasn't exactly bouldering; it was just sort of, from what I can tell from my research, it qualifies a class 3 kind of hiking-ish. So, we were just, no ropes or anything; nothing fancy, just good mobile shoes and our bodies climbing around on rocks. So I was with two friends: one's name was Henry and one’s name was Mountain. We were running around on these rocks, and the three of us have… we have pretty athletic backgrounds. We're all relatively in shape. And we like to do fun stuff, so we would try climbing on these rocks and approach these different steep angles and try to get ourselves up and over these boulders. And we learned one really important lesson that I wanna share with you today. And it's important because of not just, you know, bouldering but because of how it would apply to your regular life. It was a lesson I did not expect to learn, but I think it was a really important lesson to have learned. So we kept approaching these different challenges. We'd ran into these situations where were trying to climb higher and higher on these rocks, on these boulders. And we all had different body types, and we had different strengths and weaknesses. One guy, Henry, is extremely strong. Tons of muscle on him. Just an incredible athlete. And so he had that body type. My friend, Mountain, also very strong. Very lean, very mobile. But he had a bag, kind of like a… I don't know what you would call it, just a man bag, but a small man bag slung around one shoulder and around his chest, that kind of changed his balance point and effected what he was able to do. And then there's me who, you know, is just incredibly, incredibly good looking. And you know, I have my own body type which you can see online when you watch my YouTube videos. And you know, we're all a little bit different height. One of us is taller; one is shorter, a little bit leaner, a little less lean, whatever. So we all had our different backgrounds and different tolerances for risk. And so at one point, we were climbing up these boulders and my friend Henry started going up this path to try to get up over these boulders. And I was watching him and I thought, “Oh my god, that's crazy! That’s just too hard. Whatever you're thinking, I'm not doing that.” And you know, I said, “Why are you going that way? Over here is the easy way.” And Mountain was like, “Yeah, that way does look pretty hard.” He was having very similar thought. Like, “Wow, the way that Henry is choosing looks really, really difficult...

Find out how flawed measurements of improvement in hip surgery patients make hip surgery seem like a great idea.

Resources:

Harris Hip Score

Arthroscopic Femoroplasty in the Management of Cam-type Femoroacetabular Impingement

Partial Transcript:

Hey, everybody! This is Matt Hsu from Upright Health and welcome to Episode 15 of the Upright Health Podcast. Today, I am looking at something called the Harris Hip Score. And we're looking at that in the context of hip surgery for people who Femoroacetabular Impingement nerve who have been given the diagnosis of FAI. I’ve talked in depth about this in videos and online in many different formats. I believe that this diagnosis is one of basically illusory misplaced faith in diagnostic imaging, and then you pile surgery on top of that and you leave people in a pretty terrible lurch. So I have been getting a lot of comments and emails from people who have been doing those stretches and taking a different approach to their hip problems and they've been seeing marked improvements. And I really appreciate your sharing those stories with me because it motivates me to continue digging deeper into the research and helping share more information that others can use to first, change their mindset and second, start doing different things like stretching properly, addressing muscle properly, addressing coordination issues properly so that they can start moving their hips better. So for all of all of you who have already sent those messages to me, I really appreciate it. I really enjoy hearing your stories of success and seeing you succeed, really with what can be a really frustrating, painful and stubborn problem. But in any case, today, we're talking about the Harris Hip Score because it's something that I noticed was referenced in a lot of studies on surgery for hip impingements. So basically, the Harris Hip Score is a questionnaire that's used to determine how healthy your hips are. It's only thirteen questions in its full form. There's a modified version which is a little bit shorter. It takes out a number of questions that have almost no… I mean very little amount of points that they add to your total score and that, you know, from my experience are probably -- from my vantage point anyway – are probably not that effective and useful for assessments, but in any case, it's got thirteen questions in its full form and you can have a total score of 100 points. The Harris Hip Score is used to determine whether or not surgery is successful. So in order to consider a surgery a success, you are supposed to have improvement in your Harris Hip Score of 20 points. So for example, if I were going to consider surgery for my hips, I would graded using the Harris Hip Score before surgery and after the surgery, I’d follow up, whatever, a couple months down the line, a year down the line, two years down the line. We’d check in and see what my Harris Hip Score is. As long as I'm maintaining a twenty point improvement, it's considered a successful surgery. So, I'm going to give you a study here to take a look at and it's from March 2009 edition of the clinical orthopedics and related research journal by J. W. Thomas Byrd and Kay S. Jones. What they had was two hundred people with hip problems. A couple of them had more than one hip that was problematic, so they had 207 hips to work on. Average age was thirty three years with a hundred and thirty eight men and sixty two women. They underwent correction of cam impingement, and also forty two patients underwent surgery for cam and pincer impingement. So in this abstract they mentioned that the increase in the Harris Hip Score -- the average increase -- was twenty points. Yes! So, based on the average, pretty successful. If  we look deeper into the results,..

Learn how to identify issues and possible solutions for your aches and pains, and then discover how to gauge progress. 

Partial Transcript: Hey, everybody! It's Matt Hsu from Upright Health. Welcome to Episode 14 - How to troubleshoot your own body. So, today, I want to help you learn how to identify issues and possible solutions for your own aches and pains and also, how you can figure out whether what you're doing is the right thing. You'll have to excuse my voice today; a cold is attempting to take root in my sinuses and I am doing everything I can to destroy it and excise it from my body. So, I do still want to share this information with you, however, so just bear with my voice. Now, to talk about this, I wanted to start with a real life example.

So this is a situation that I actually had personally. So I used to find it extremely, extremely uncomfortable to lie on my side whether I was on a hard surface or a soft surface. I had a couple of things that hurt actually: if I lay down on my right side, then my right shoulder and my right hip would hurt; if I lay on my left, it will just be my left hip. So, today, I wanna focus a lot on the hips since that is a big thing that a lot of people struggle with. So, lying on my side, if I was on the floor, I would feel like it's as if the bone was really, really sensitive.

So the bone that actually sticks out and hits the floor around the hip joint area is actually your greater trochanter. It's not where your actual hip joint. It's where your femur, the thigh bone, actually just sort of jets out a little bit. It's also where you get a lot of attachments for muscles, so the muscles that do influence your hip joint movements, there are many that actually attach to the greater trochanter. So, if I went and lay in bed, then I would have less of the sharp pain but still get a lot of this very hard to describe kind of achy, gnawing kind of, agitating sensation in my hips. So it wasn't like there was pinching happening.

It wasn’t like there was sharpness that a hard surface would give me, but there was definitely this internal sense, like, “Good Lord! I need to get out of this position.” And I would turn up, you know, face up and I would still have this odd, achy sensation. I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried to do some different things. We’re going to go through some of those options today, in discussions with clients and with people who've been trying to train their bodies to feel better. I've kind of narrowed it down to very simple three things that you can do to try to help yourself when something hurts. So, we can look at those three things and those three things are: stretch, smash or strengthen. So, “stretch,” I think everybody is familiar with. That's when you are trying to make a muscle used to stretching, in getting used to a different range of motion. You can “smash,” which is like form rolling. If it's a ball, you can have somebody give you a deep tissue massage. And you can “strengthen,” which is to attempt to make something stronger by training it, by making it do a certain motion with some resistance. So with my hips, what I ended up doing was trying to stretch the areas that were uncomfortable; so that includes the again, the outer area of my hips, so that's sort of like the proverbial “side butt”, it's the side of your thighs. So I tried some things that stretch there. I did some glut stretches. I tried to do some IT Band stretches. And those actually really did not feel good.

They did not help anything. And actually, they tended to make my hips feel less stable and more sensitive. So that did not work very well and that was easy for me to see. The stretching even immediately, didn’t seem to help. I tried smashing, so I’d use a ball. I used a Lacrosse ball or foam roller and that kind of helped a little bit....

How important is terminology to solving your problems? Poor use of language can trap you in pain.

Transcript: Hey, everybody! Welcome to Episode 13 of the Upright Health Podcast. This is Matt Hsu. And today, we're going to be talking about “sloppy thinking down a slippery slope.” So I had a discussion with a guy a couple weeks ago in the locker room about some of the issues he was having with his hip and knee. A couple of us were in the locker room after a pickup game, just talking about how we're going to be stretching our hips in different ways. And we were all very excited to be stretching in different ways and another guy chimed in and said that he had been working on different ways to stretch his hips because he had been having some knee and hip issues. And basically, the doctors had said, “Well, might be some Tendinitis near the knee. It might be Piriformis. It might be your SI Joint.” And when he said “SI Joint,” I said, “That doesn’t even makes sense.” And then we got into a debate about whether or not terminology is really that important when you're discussing things like this. And my contention is that you need to be very, very, very, very clear when you are using language about cause and effect, and you're dealing with the human body. So you know, he was saying it might be the tendon. It might be Piriformis. Both of those, I could say, “Okay, let’s make some sense. Those are soft tissues that can affect things. That makes sense.” And then when he said “SI Joint,” I said, “That doesn’t make sense. The joint doesn’t control anything.” And that’s when he said, “No, no, no, no, it is the joint but blah, blah, blah.” And I said, “Look, the joint is just two bones meeting. The joint is the space where two joints meet. It doesn’t include the muscles around the joint.” Sometimes when we're just sort of talking casually, we may say, “Oh, yeah, SI Joint includes all muscles around that joint.” But when we're trying to be very clear, the joint is simply where two bones meet. And when we think about it that way, we need to realize that that is not going to cause you any issues, right? Even if you have signs of joint degeneration in any joint, it's not, not, not, not, not a sign that the joint degeneration is causing you pain. Quite to the contrary, right? There have been many studies that show that signs of joint degeneration do not correlate at all to whether or not you have pain. So when we say, “Oh, a joint is causing you pain,” we have to actually back up and realize that the joint is probably not doing anything. If you have a skeleton lying in the dirt with no muscle, no soft tissue and no brain sending any commands to anything, you have a skeleton that isn't moving, right? It's not going to do anything. You're not going… that skeleton is clearly not experiencing pain, whether from joint degeneration or from the lack of a brain. So we got into this discussion about a concise use of language and that's an idea that is extremely, extremely important to me as somebody who has studied literature and tried to learn a number of languages in my life. I think the clearer use of language is fundamental to having a good discussion on anything, and to solving any problem. You just have to be very clear about all the words to you use. And so this whole discussion got me thinking about how sloppy we can get when we start talking about a cause of pain in our body. And I'm realizing I'm going back to the whole arthritis idea again, and I hope you are not tired of me beating this horse but the idea of arthritis is that we're looking at signs of degeneration in the joint where you have pain and we say arthritis is causing you pain. To even get the diagnosis, you already have the pain and then you have the joint degeneration and then you say you have arthritis, then you say the arthritis is causing you pain. This is not really true, right? We're looking at arthritis with its pain a

Frustrated as you journey out of chronic pain? Matt explains three key strategies that you can use over and over again to maintain motivation and make progress in your functional training.

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Matt Hsu explains how specificity can lead to better results. Functional training without some specific functional goals can be pointless and frustrating. Here’s how to make it more practical for yourself in the long-run.

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Matt waxes philosophical on Thanksgiving…

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Knee pain sucks. Doctors often say it’s caused by arthritis. But research points to muscles that could actually stop your knee pain - regardless of the “bone damage” in your knees…

Study on knee arthritis: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22961435/ 
Why you don’t need surgery: https://www.uprighthealth.com/blog/avoid-orthopedic-surgery-joint-pain

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