Show notes
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...