Healing the Body Through Movement – Vinny Crispino.

Vinny Crispino will be doing his first ultramarthon soon, the Old Cascadia on the Oregon Blue River in the Old Cascadia Range which is a 50 mile, 14,800 elevation gain trail with a time limit of 17 hours. His goal is to finish and survive.

Vinny says he wasn’t very good at any sport except swimming. He wasn’t very athletic on dry land, but when it came to a pool it was his natural zone. Within the first years of swimming competition he was breaking pool records and state records. From age six to eighteen he spent every day in the pool. And when he had off-days from training he was playing in the pool with friends.

When he got to high school he was captain of the team and broke a bunch of state records. He went on to compete in the division 1 swimming program at the University of Wyoming.

But he says he had burned out on swimming at about age fifteen. He stayed in the sport because when you compete at that level your friends are all involved in the sport. And it was the sport that would give him a scholarship. Eventually he had to face the fact that he didn’t want to swim competitively any more. But he still loved the water so he decided to sell everything, leave the University of Wyoming, and go to California and become a professional surfer.

He says he wasn’t a natural at surfing, but was making progress. He hadn’t been at it very long when a big wave knocked him off his board and crushed him to the bottom where he hit a rock and broke his back.

He went from being incredibly bulletproof and feeling invincible as an athlete and feeling like he could do whatever he wanted in the water to having that one moment break his back and his identity. It made standing for a minute or two a hell on earth for him, and that one moment launched him into living almost a full decade with a severe disability.

He says he didn’t really surf for very long, but he definitely came to a place of enjoyment for the sport. Surfing allowed for competition, but it was free-form and flowing. It was a vehicle for expression that required skill and mastery without the analytical precision of swimming: the times, the splits, and the numbers in training and competition. He says that that first time he went surfing after giving up swimming he found deep joy, and he never missed swimming. He never looked back or regretted giving it up or thought about where he might have been had he kept at it. He was just fixated on that new chapter in his life that opened up, and unfortunately it was very short lived.

Vinny’s official diagnosis was a multiple herniation of his T-12 vertebre. The fracture and the force of the impact displaced his lumbar spine 21 degrees to the left. So he basically developed lumbar scoliosis. He really was very fortunate that he didn’t have spinal cord damage.

At the time that happened, after he came out of shock he was left with no feeling in his left leg. He sought various medical views and some said he needed surgery. Some said just rehab, but he was going to require assistance to walk and that the best option wast maybe a wheelchair.

Vinny spent the next five years looking for alternatives that didn’t leave him immobilized for the rest of his life. He tried chiropractors, physiotherapy, yoga, and acupuncture. Nothing helped.

He finally found a “body worker,” that’s what he called himself. In his first session he was laying in a position the body worker was just telling him how to move how he wanted him to move and how to shift his body. He wasn’t even touching Vinny. He was only sitting in a chair beside him. So basically this re-educated him on how to move and how things should work. And after an hour of these annoyingly simple, disappointing exercises he told him to get up, and for the first time in 5 years he was able to stand up without a sharp stabbing pain in his lower back. Vinny was confused because he thought that when you have an intense problem you should need an intense solution to fix it. But these simple movements worked when nothing else had.

Vinny continued working with his body worker and his body gradually healed. He then went on to learn the process and started the Pain Academy where he teaches others how to heal their bodies through movement. His program is a 52-week comprehensive course on how to move your body in a way that is natural and healing.

He talks about how the body is incredibly brilliant at compensating, and without you having a formal education in mechanics your body is still going to find a way to rotate and re-align to compensate for pain. If you focus on correcting just that one movement it will cause an excess load and pain in a different part of your body. That’s why his program looks at the total body movement and doesn’t just focus on symptoms.