S01E10 - Dislocation, Dislocation, Dislocation

In the final episode of Season 1 Niko is humbled and has to rent space in a gym, has his death plotted by CrossFit Trainers and performs an emergency medical procedure on himself!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello everyone, welcome to the PT Chronicles Podcast, the story of a small town Welsh boy and his rise to the very middle of the fitness industry. As always, I'm your host, Nico Algiri, and I'm also the main protagonist in this story. So let's get into the final episode of season one. Dislocation, dislocation, dislocation. So as you know, I had to do the one thing that I always said I wasn't gonna do, and that was work in a gym. Now what I meant by that was work in a commercial gym. So this was kind of a this is kind of a halfway point to what I'm trying to say, is that I started renting out of a small gym called Heart and Soul at the top of Ladbrook Grove in West London. Now I say small, it was it was brilliant. It had three levels consisting of a weights room, a cardio room, and a very impressive functional CrossFit room on the top level. The gym was run by two PTs, Sarah and James Colburn, who I'll always be thankful for for letting me use their amazing space. At this point I'm about 18 to 20 PT career. I've got a huge client base that I've developed from Bootcamp Pilates and still living in Kennington. Now I remember walking into Heart and Soul for the first time and thinking, uh, error. James and Sarah were great, but the lads upstairs, the trainers, the seasoned trainers, Lee, Greg, and Shahin, all cut me that look. You know, when the wrong guy walks into the wrong bar in the movies and that tumbleweed sound comes in, everyone just turns and look at them. That I could tell it was going to be a struggle. I got it though. They were CrossFit lads and they were all level four strength and conditioning qualification coaches. And in walks this skinny leg TRXer, and you know what, whatever the fuck that meant to them, I don't think they knew what it was. And hangs this strap over the chin-up bar, and I didn't move there because I was so busy. I had eight clients, eight hours of clients in a row, so they hated me immediately because I was uh monopolizing the chin bar continuously. And if you know CrossFit, they love to do chin-ups, kip and pull-ups, lots of gymnastics, uh L sit, L-shaped sits. So I was just in the way and annoying. I also put my own music on. So do you know what? As I'm saying it, I'm annoying myself. Anyway, I didn't use their methods and I was hogging the bar. They hated me immediately. This went on for a few months, and after a while I actually got to know them quite well, and especially Lee, one of the trainers there. Vastly knowledgeable, proud, moody Irishman who trains harder than most people I've ever seen in my life. I think he's a purple belt in blu in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So I mean that was a few years back, so he must be close to one of the highest levels now. This essentially means that if Lee grabs hold of you, your life is over. We trained together a few times with him teaching me Olympic lifting and me showing him all the stuff on the TRX, mainly upper body moves, so he could incorporate it with some of his CrossFit training. Baby steps. In fact, after a while, they all accepted me as the crazy TRX guy and allowed me not to die, which I'm sure they'd been planning to all along. I'm sure they were going to bury me somewhere in Labra Grove. Anyway, one fine West London day, I had a gap in the middle of my rather busy schedule, so I decided to train. Now I was training a lot of TRX and weights at this point, so I was getting stronger and stronger because I also had the influence of these guys. You know, I had my methods, but I was watching Lee and Shahin and Greg do these, you know, deadlifts, power cleans, snatches, they were doing uh Olympic ring muscle up. So I was watching this and I was starting to incorporate into my training. So I felt superhuman. Now, if you've ever seen my social media and you've watched the array of different TRX movements that I can do, especially on my Instagram, I'm always showing off, right? Always trying to do the Superman stuff. You know, you're always going for the views, likes, comments, right? Engagement, content. Anyway, I was having a very strong day. Handstands felt like just breathing to me. Single leg box jumps felt like walking upstairs. So I made the extremely smart and well-informed decision to perform a certain move I'd had my eye on for a while. A rollout. It's something people do with next to zero functional basis behind it. I actually hate the move. Think full plank, or when you see people doing ab wheels, think about ab wheel, but doing it on the TRX. Now it's an extremely dangerous move because of the physics of it. The actual load is on your shoulder joint, which I completely disagree with. There's loads of different core moves in the world that you can do to train your abs, your obliques, your intercostal muscles, your pelvic floor. I just find them ridiculous. I think they're just a way of showing off, which of course was what I was doing. However, because I was having a strong day, I decided to do it with one arm, moron. So I set my feet back a little. So I'm leaning one-handed into the TRX, I set a strong plank, I'm ready. I slide my hand, holding the TRX handle further away from me, engaging a seriously intense single arm plank. Wow. I remember the pressure, it was so difficult. But I I get my left hand back in, drag it close to my body, barely, I might add. One rep down. Feeling great. Rep two was a struggle too. Rep three. I'd like to pause there. Now, if you've done one physics lesson in your entire life, you'd have looked at my body position, assessed the movement, and known that it just wasn't going to work. I don't know why I thought it was going to either. Actually, I do ego. Unpause. So I begin rolling out into that third rep. All eyes in the gym are on me because this move looks cool despite being dangerous. As my arm moves further away from me, I feel like Mr. TRX, he's doing it. I'm doing it. I'm the man. I'm number one. I reach the maximum distance that my arm can move away, and then as if in slow motion, but not, I'm stuck. In real time, it was about half a second, but for me it was 10 seconds of shit. What's that ripping clicking sound coming from my shoulder? And honestly, it was like and then boom, my arm just exploded. My shoulder exploded out of the socket. I plummet to the floor onto my knees, and the pain is unreal. It feels like uh an elephant was actually standing on my arm and my chest because my shoulder, the head of my humerus, had actually dropped out of the shoulder and was sitting in my peck. I look at Lee's face and it tells me whatever pain I'm feeling in my arm is matched by the visual. I look down to see what used to be my shoulder, and of course I see it sitting in my chest. I'm nearly sick, I nearly puke. But the only thing keeping me from passing out is the actual pain. I can't describe it to you, but I just knew intuitively that it needed to be put back in immediately. I've got no medical experience, no training, but the pressure was so immense that it just needed to be put back and released. I knew I couldn't just leave it there and go to hospital. So then my first instinct was then to look up and go, guys, can anyone help me? All you see is a sea of shaking, frightened heads. No one would help me because who actually knows how to do this in this situation? I thought I did, so I stood up, sheepishly grabbed a staircase bar in my hand and took a deep breath in. And on the breath out, I dropped my hips back, and then plop, my arm just dropped back in perfectly into the socket. I am a hero. I stood up, moved my arm, testing my relocating skill set, shoulders in the joint, it felt fine, and then boom, I all smarty pants, hit the floor, passed out, start shaking with shock. There is actually video evidence of this, and you can see this on my Instagram, but I don't want to divulge too much because I wanted to be on Netflix, of course, when this gets picked up. Now, two hours later, I'm sat in the emergency room in agony, whilst my client, who was going to be next after that training session, sits next to me just shaking her head. She's kind of giving me sympathy, but also giving me that look like you idiot. The doctor calls me in and lays one of my favourite quotes in my life so far. You should have not put your own shoulder back in, but you put it back in perfectly. Hero. Roll credits.