Episode Details

Sorry for the clickbait title. This might not be what you think, but it's the truth. My biggest struggle as a web developer is the toll it takes on my body is my neck. So let's, let's open that up. Um, this is for real though. So, uh, it's something that I don't know. I probably haven't talked publicly about ever.

But I, so I've always been pretty active kid, skateboarder. Um, I dunno, park Corps before there was a name for it. Uh, I've always kinda done gym, backyard gymnastics, and I've always just done stupid stuff basically, and gotten hurt doing it. One time. I really wanted to learn how to do a backflip.

That was my, my big goal was I thought like, you know, all this stuff's cool. I could do a front flip, all right, whatever. But a backflip, that's the thing. That's the cool thing. It's hard to do. It's hard to convince your brain to like put your head behind you. Like it's very hard if you've ever tried to do a back flip, it's not easy.

Um, but I eventually conquered the fear kind of by. Doing it. And I did it wrong and I was doing it in the grass. I remember outside my house, I convinced a friend to throw me off of his deck backwards into a pool of water. So I was like, that's safe. That's easy. So I remember he was a big guy and he would do that just like Chuck me behind him with my legs, like grabbed my ankles and throw.

I would jump and he would throw me and I would do these backflips tonight so that I, I needed that to show my brain how to get, uh, like behind itself. You know, how to go backwards. So then that night I remember I went home. And I was in the grass, like the side yard grass, and I was just doing back flips and this was, this was my technique, just lunch.

Oh, okay. I could do them on the trampoline. Yeah. Yeah. I could do them on the trampoline, but I want to do them on the ground. That was my big goal cause it's totally different. Totally different. You have to do it so much faster. So on the ground, I just like, I remember I would like treat it like a trampoline.

I would just jump on the ground with all the power in my legs and just throw myself backwards. And pretty much get it, and I can pretty much do a backup. But they were sloppy, you know, there was, it wasn't good for them at all. Um, and I landed on my neck and it, I remember that I didn't like snap my neck and get paralyzed, but I definitely landed on my neck and it like kinked sideways.

And I remember being super scared and shaken up and be like, Holy crap. Like this is the thing that people warn you about. And I just did it. My neck really hurt for awhile and I didn't tell anybody. No kind of went away. Then I was doing Spiderman front flips. This is even stupid. But on a trampoline.

My buddy Keith, he, we had a trampoline in our backyard and we just did tons of cool trampoline stuff, whatever, stupid trampoline stuff. Um, we didn't have a net or anything. Of course not that matters, but one of the things that he showed me his, he called them Spiderman flips, and so he would jump as high as you can and you would flail out like Spiderman, like you would like wave your arms out and you would be totally horizontal.

To a little bit facing down. So you're just like, almost like a parachuting or whatever, like skydiving, you're just like free falling. And then right before you hit the trampoline, you tuck your head in and do a quick roll and you land on your back. So the idea is like, it's a very delayed front flip.

Anything like that. Super dangerous because you can delay it too far, obviously. And I did and I delayed too far. And when I talked, I basically just. Dove headfirst into a trampoline and my chin, like crushed into my chest and it like really straightened that, hurt my neck pretty bad. Fast forward some years into like.

Late high school, I was at a chiropractor, like what? High schoolers at a chiropractor, but I, my neck was just hurting, whatever. So to