How Quickly Can I Fix My Broken Ankle?

I'm Brian Johnson, that crazy tech guy who's asking if we could be the first generation to not die. I'm following a rigorous day to day protocol to slow and reverse my aging damage. But sometimes things don't go to plan. Be careful. Lots of trips. Hey guys. What happened? Oh, dancing. I was at a music festival and I danced and I sprained my ankle. It was a great moment and I just told everybody to be careful. I had my don't die hat on and then I got after it and my foot dropped in a hole and it rolled and. And now I walk around on crutches. I can't exercise and it takes me 10 times longer to do basic life stuff. And so for the past few days I've been trying to assess damage. I got an MRI, CT scan. We now have the results. I have a minor fracture. It doesn't, it doesn't cross the threshold for surgery. So I just am on a path for repair. So I'm now trying to figure out the fastest healing protocol we could achieve. It stinks and it derails a lot of things I was doing. But that's okay. I'm going to work through it. Now we know what the actual injury is with an MRI and a ct. Now the question is what treatments you do now? Because I was trying to achieve a new world record of the fastest healing fracture and sprain ever. We did seven therapies, Peptides, focus shockwave therapy, emtt, laser soft tissue work, PRP and physical therapy. Now normally we would take one therapy and isolate it and say, does this therapy achieve the result we care about? But in this circumstance, because I'm trying to heal my ankle, we took the risk of just saying we're going to do everything we can think of that has evidence to show that the ankle can be improved with these therapies. Today we're doing PRP to my sprained ankle and then I'm doing a whole bunch of other rejuvenation therapies and getting my foot poke, which you have. The foot hurts.

How you doing this morning?

Great. On week one, I was devastated. One because the practical things on a day to day basis took me ten times as long. But also because I could no longer work out. And working out every day is my happiest moment of the day. When I go to bed at night, I know in the morning it's like my favorite moment. I get an hour in the gym and, and it's going to be fantastic. And so that was really sad. I did go into the gym A little bit. My. My doctor told me not to. And I would sit down and I would try to do things I could. I would do curls or I do something on my shoulder, but something to get my blood flowing. It was very, very hard to not be active. And I noticed within just a few days time, I started putting on weight. I felt lethargic. My whole body changed in a matter of days. It was stunning how fast it changed.

You have a seat and they'll be in just a minute.

Okay. I drank my water this morning so my veins would be ready for the blood draw. Hey, good morning.

Good morning. How are you?

Good.

My name is Cheryl. I'm gonna do the blood draw.

How do you love those veins?

They're great.

Make your job easier.

So much easier. I could probably do it with my eyes closed.

Are you serious?

No, I'm not gonna. Thanks for being so hydrated. You make my life easy.

I tried my very best. Ready? Let's go. Historically, this is how society has thought about athletes. And I'm a new kind of athlete. I'm a rejuvenation athlete. So we're gonna put a picture up here of what does, you know, anti aging look like and trying to not die. Why do you think the bruising landed at the top? Gravity?

I'm thinking yeah, but was like that, but I'm not sure.

And then incredible wear. It could be they compressed everything.

Compression.

Ye.

The second therapy I used was focused shockwave therapy. It uses acoustic waves and it promotes healing properties in the wounded area. I also use this technology for rejuvenating Johnson's Johnson. When we were trying to increase nighttime erections and rejuvenate the penis. Overall, this technology is turning out to be quite stimulating. In week two, we started experimenting with laser therapy. I also tried some creative solutions for getting around the house.

Well, I did not use my hands.

True. What about the cart? Some were more effective than others. This is going to make things so much fun. I'm gonna start doing time lapse. Next is emt. It uses high energy magnetic pulses again to stimulate healing. The interesting thing about this one is you once you put the device on the foot, you can't actually feel it working. But what we did is we took a circle of paper clips and we put them right below and we turned it on and sparks flew. It's really a nerdy thing, but the actual, the visual appearance of your PRP is a huge deal. So that that's really clean. If you've got a poor diet or you're in poor health, it's not going to be that good looking. So it definitely. It's a flex.

How's it going?

Ready to go.

Of course. You got some nice looking healthy plasma that's really clean. You see how it's like a luminescent, the color.

I'm glad you noticed. Would you say it's potentially the cleanest you've ever seen?

Not on record.

Yes.

It's up there in the top 1%.

Yeah.

Because my other patients all get jealous.

So tell me, where's the area primarily in here. Okay. And then through here.

Okay. This is all from secondary swelling. So think of the human body as pretty remarkable when it reacts to trauma almost immediately, that your body mobilizes cells to the area of injury. Like mobile paramedics.

Yeah.

Part of the healing process is the swelling, which turns to like redness, soreness, and then eventually bruising. And you can see the colors here have kind of processed pretty quickly. I know. Even doing laser and EMT and shockwave. So it's speeds the body's natural course of inflammation and recovery, which usually is the first like 48 to 72 hours. So your diagnosis is a mildly displaced avulsion fracture of the calcaneus anterolaterally, which means like front, outside. And so whenever you sprain a ligament enough with enough force, you must have really gone at this. Is that when the ligament tears, it can tear the bony attachment with it. And so you'll have a little bony fragment. And this is Brian's CT scan. Do you see this area here, that like little piece of bone that chipped off. So if you imagine like a ligament, like a dome, kind of connects these two together and it got pulled to a force that tore the ligament and then pulled a piece of bone off the attachment. And that's the CT scan.

Is that something you see? Is that common or uncommon?

It's less common because it usually requires a greater force of injury, but it's not an uncommon injury that we don't see a history of. Previous ankle sprain in the past several trauma?

Yeah.

Mostly on this ankle or both.

Yeah, I've probably sprained both ankle, each ankle three times. I played a lot of sports and danced a lot.

The goal is to help strengthen and repair the ligament, provide more resiliency with less scar tissue than if you were just leaving it to the body to heal on its own. Doing okay?

Yes.

Finished.

Yay. Not too bad, not too bad. Thanks, doctor.

All right.

Sorry.

Yeah. Appreciate it.

I'll see you soon.

See you soon. Thank you. From week three onwards, I Also worked on physical therapy, and we did a lot of it. Trey became a new friend. He invented this Achilles device, and it was also the first time in my life I specifically worked my ankles out.

So my name is Trey, and I specialize in training professional athletes and celebrities. I am an inventor of a machine called Achilles, and that device helps rehabilitate and exercises all the lower leg extremity.

Now, week four is a danger zone because you think maybe you're okay to start doing a bit more activity, but you're really at risk of re injuring yourself, so you have to be very careful. That week was active, though. I went to the movies with Talmadge. I went to San Francisco to be roasted at a tech roast show. I hosted several dinners. I went to the dentist, and these were on top of the therapies, plus a full schedule of work. Week four was also a really big turning point because my ankle was getting stronger. I could feel it. In fact, it was potentially on the path of being much stronger than when I hurt my ankle.

So how do you feel today?

Great.

Nothing? No pain?

No pain, no soreness. I wonder if my left ankle is stronger now than my right ankle.

Possibly. We'll find out. I was an all state quarterback, Suffered a ton of injuries in my ankles and my feet. I was doing all the necessary protocols, deep tissue massages, anything you can really do at that time. When I came back from that injury, I just kept suffering more and more injuries in the ankles. Really frustrating. And I was meditating one day, I had an idea, and me and my dad put it together, and fast forward maybe seven, eight years. Here we are today. You doing Shockwave today?

Yes. EMTT laser.

I met Brian about two and a half weeks ago in person. And, you know, our goal here is to get Brian at peak, peak level as fast as possible, and we want to do it right. I'm putting Brian through a series of exercises and rehab, of course, with the Achilles, but also with a lot of stimulation on fee activation, a lot of isometrics, balancing drills, anything that that will activate his feet and ankle complex. We're focusing on full range of motions and strength. Today we're gonna lunge right here.

Keep this with my left foot on the front.

Yeah.

Okay. Fun.

Yeah. So let's see if we can do that.

Okay, cool.

Let's test it out.

Let's test it out. You can hold me for balance if you need to.

Yeah.

Stuck.

Slowly.

There you go.

Come forward a little bit.

Perfect.

Right there.

Hold that.

I'm gonna hit that for 15 seconds.

Fun. Okay, this is great.

How's that feel? No pain, no pain. All right, we got 10 seconds. Good. Four, three, two. Nice job. That was nice.

Cool move.

That was nice. He's actually recovering faster than I've seen athletes recover before. I think a big part of it is also his lifestyle of, of eating very clean and not having any type of inflammation in his body that overall helps the process a lot faster.

We're off to do therapy for my sprained ankle. This is week five. Just three weeks ago I was on crutches coming here and now look at this. I'm like jumping around. What if I injured it?

Bruising is completely gone now, so it's a really good sign.

Okay, there we go. Week five. Things started to normalize a little bit. I was back in my shoes, so the boot was off. I had a little brace. I did my triple therapy twice a week. But otherwise I was back to my normal routine, doing my normal stuff. And it was amazing to be back on two feet, especially up and down the stairs without having to use crutches. Today we're doing foot therapy. Joey has been working on soft tissue. First thing to get started today is I'm going to wash my, you know, if, if you're about to touch someone else's feet, you probably want them cleaned. And even though the other night I had a, a friend was over and I had a surprise foot smelling infection. We were talking about smelly feet and my feet were smelled and I got a 97% approval score. It's like a random drug test. So friends, just be ready at all points in time to not have smelly feet. Okay, next is soft tissue work, which was new to me. I've never had it before. You can think of it like a massage. And Joey was excellent. And Joey, how long have you been doing this work?

I've been working in physical therapy in different capacities since I was in high school, since I was 15 years old and been a practicing chiropractor for almost, I guess about seven years. Fully in it for the past seven years.

So you've seen hundreds of injuries.

Lots. Especially ankles. I used to work with a basketball team with the, you know, with the LA Clippers. And so it was so many foot injuries, ankle injuries, a lot of sports stuff. And then even outside of sports, yet lots of these. I mean, your healing has been really, it's pretty amazing. This is, this is week five.

Week five.

You know, evulsions like this, six weeks is kind of like the minimum. I've seen them take months. You Know like up to 12 weeks. Of course you're still healing, but in terms of where you're at, it's pretty remarkable, I gotta say. So on a pretty good, pretty good pace of recovery here, there's so much.

Feeling in the feet. And so when you have pain coupled with feeling, it just creates this weird mixture. So it's like when you're massaging out a something that's hurt, there's. It hurts, but also feels so good to move the hurt outside the body. Actually, this is a lead in to Only Fans or the launch of our Only Fans account. Maybe I don't want to film.

So these, these kind of isometric holds, they're really good at just getting the brain and the joint stable before you do some more dynamic movements. Just because we kind of made everything mush and then we want to just make sure it's not like loosey goosey. You want to feel connected to it. Isometrics are great for that. So just work through this range of motion. I don't care if your heel comes up in this instant. Okay, Try that first.

Okay. Okay. So where am I at now? Well, I have good news for you. On week four, I started cycling on my stationary bike because my doctor told me it was a good one for low impact, but also I could get a good cardiovascular activity in. And so I wondered, what am I capable of now? My ankle started feeling really good. I'd never in my life, of course, focused as much attention on building ankle strength. And so I started going. And over the past couple weeks, I have beat my best score ever five times in a row. So exceeding the previous best five times successively.

Almost a full 30 seconds.

All right, now let's try to synthesize what we've discussed today. First, we all know this to be obvious, but it's also the hardest that mastering the basics of sleep, diet and exercise is really important to keep our body healthy. And also if we do get injured, to be in the right starting point so our body can heal itself. Number two is if you're injured, to take it seriously, even if you think it's minor. It's good to take precautionary steps and figure out, like, how bad is it? And then to map out a plan for therapies. And three, and this is really where I've been changing my life is. I have reconsidered the things I'm willing to do that pose injury risk for me. So I grew up snowboarding and I've done that occasionally over the past few years. I don't think I'll be doing that anymore. Now, I know for many of you you're going to say, oh no, this is terrible. You're not going to live life anymore. Guess what? That experience is not worth it to me to potentially being injured and knocked out of life for six to eight to 10 weeks. Whatever the injury is, it's just not worth it. I have so many other life goals I want to pursue. I love my daily life so much. I don't want to make that trade off. And maybe sometimes YOLO is not the right answer. And that's my invitation to you today, is that we are entering into a new phase of being human and the old rules of how to behave no longer apply. This does not mean a lesser life. It means a fuller life, a bigger life, and explorers of a new horizon that have never been imagined by humans. Be well.