What sets pro athletes apart from us mere mortals? What lesson did Matt learn from his body's failure to handle a power skating clinic? What is a power skating clinic?

Transcript:
Hey, everybody! It’s Matt Hsu from Upright Health and welcome to Episode 20 of the Upright Health podcast. Today, we are talking about you, the individual.
So, two weeks ago, I had an experience that I thought was relevant, that I thought was interesting, that was a little discouraging and which, combined with some other observations, made me realize there was a topic that I wanted to talk about with you today. So a couple of weeks ago, I went to a Robby Glantz Power Skating Clinic. And for those who are not familiar (and I don't expect many of you will be), a Robby Glantz Power Skating Clinic is a clinic that’s put on for hockey players who want to learn how to skate better. It's for hockey players to learn how to use their edges better, figure out how to get a quicker start, how to skate backwards better -- all kinds of good stuff. This guy, Robby Glantz, does clinics all over the country. I'm sure he goes in to Canada. He’s been doing in for as long as I can remember reading hockey magazines. So I finally got a chance to go to one of these clinics as a full grown adult, here in the Bay Area in Redwood City. And it was a three-day clinic. So that meant every single day, we spent about an hour and fifteen minutes doing skating drills. And we did that Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
So what happened to me that I thought would be a good learning opportunity for everybody, was I started off in this three day event by doing a workout. So I did a bunch of heavy squats and did just the normal workout anyway, on Sunday morning. And then went to the clinic Sunday night, skated as hard as I could for an hour and fifteen minutes. And then Monday, I did the same thing. I didn't work out, but I was training other people. And then in the evening, I went straight to the clinic, stretched a little bit and bam, bam, bam, skate, skate, skate, skate, skate. And then Tuesday, same pattern: skate, skate, skate, skate, skate.
Now, by Monday, I was pretty sore. And it was interesting to me to feel what was getting sore. I actually hadn't been that sore in a long time. I think the fact that I combined work out with a lot of hard skating for an hour and fifteen minutes made a big difference. And then at the end of clinic Tuesday, my quads (the upper parts of my thighs, where the quads’ attached to the pelvis) were absolutely trashed. They were so painful, I could barely lift my leg up. So both sides, just trying to lift my legs up. It was just so painful. I had to use my arms and hands to try to lift it, when I was taking my… with my legs when I was trying to take my skates off. And I thought, “Oh my god, this is how my hips started going bad. This must be it because I haven't felt feeling since like high school.”
And then, Tuesday, when I went to skate, it was still pretty bad. I had done a bunch of stretching and smashing to loosen things up. But going and skating again on Tuesday, really got things riled up. My legs were really, really sore. Moving my hips was kind of hard because the muscles that were supposed to control that motion were just shot from overuse. And then I started thinking, “Well, now I can kind of trace back to the roots of where my hip problems first started. Just skating, skating and skating and then never doing any of the recovery work that was necessary to keep my hips happy -- to keep my muscles around the hip joint working in a balanced way.” I just never did that. Nobody ever tells you to do that when you're in middle school or high school. What class is telling you, “Oh, yeah, you need to stretch. You need to smash your quads. You need to stretch out your inner thighs. You need to make sure your medial quads and your adductors don't get too gunked up and sticky.” Nobody tells you that stuff.