I Broke My Hip at 14. They Told Me to Stop Exercising. I Didn't Listen.

I was 14 years old, playing in the waves on the French coast, when I broke my hip.

The doctor said it was tendinitis. So two months later I went back to karate. First class back, first mawashi geri (a roundhouse), and my hip broke again. This time the diagnosis was right. Slipped capital femoral epiphysis, or épiphysiolyse in French. By the time they figured it out, it was too late for the surgery that should have happened at 14. The femoral head had healed back into the socket the wrong way.

The downstream effects, twenty years later, are: my left leg sits about 3 cm shorter than the right, I have scoliosis from the chronic muscle imbalance, I wear a compensating sole in my left shoe, and my flip-flops are two different pairs. Peak engineering.

That summer changed the trajectory of my entire life.

The doctors said I should never exercise again. They explained the math. One day the hip would start hurting from arthritis. I would go on painkillers. The painkillers would stop working. Then I would need a hip replacement. Hip replacements last 15 to 30 years and you only get a few in a lifetime, so the strategy was to push the first one out as far as possible. The way to do that was to not load it.

For the next 5 years I did nothing. I had crutches for 6 months because there was a 30 percent chance the same thing would happen to the other hip and put me in a wheelchair for a year. (It didn't.) I was exempt from PE through the entire baccalauréat. Every Tuesday morning I had a 2-hour gap on my school schedule, and I used it to play World of Warcraft.

That part was actually kind of fine. What was not fine was being 20, hating how my body looked, and watching my back hurt more and more as the scoliosis worsened from doing nothing.

So I started training. Against medical advice.

The slow rebellion

The first thing I tried was calisthenics. Specifically, Méthode Lafay, a brutal French bodyweight program. It worked. My posture fixed itself. I built a thin layer of muscle that has carried me through the next 15 years of on-and-off training. Never truly fit, because I never figured out nutrition. But never injured either.

At 25 I read Born To Run and got the idea to try barefoot running. The pitch in my head was: my left calf naturally bears more load already, because I tilt onto my toes on that side to make up for the short leg. So what if I ran entirely on the balls of my feet, calves loaded first, knees pre-bent, quads taking the shock? That should route the impact away from the hip, which is where every previous attempt at running had blown up.

The first run wrecked my left calf for 3 days. The second was a little better. The fifth was actually fine. It got me running. Slow, soft, slightly weird-looking, but running.

At 27 I got into rock climbing. I was overweight at the time, which capped how far I could push, but I loved it.

At 28, a boss talked me into a triathlon. I had grown up swimming before the hip blew up, so the swim was fine. I had mountain biked as a kid. I had just learned to run. So I tried. Could a guy with one short leg, a deformed femoral head, and zero formal coaching actually finish a triathlon?

Yes. That weekend changed my life, but it is a different story.

Now I am 35, post-COVID, post-baby, post-burnout, back at the start of another cycle. This time with a public deadline and a 3D-printed Iron Man suit waiting for me on the other side of the scale.

What I can and can't do

When you train with a body that does not load symmetrically, the menu shrinks fast.

Things I cannot do:

• Bench press, or anything flat-on-my-back pressing. A trainer once watched my form and pointed out that the bar tilted noticeably during my reps. The bigger back muscles on my left were doing more work. That was the last time I bench pressed.
• Squats, or any bilateral knee-bend under load. The hip insertion is off, so the twist propagates up the spine.
• Push-ups. Same problem as bench press, just in a different orientation.
• Anything jumping. Hard pass.

Things I can do, and prefer:

• Pull-ups and dips. My two favorites. They don't load the hip directly and they hit a lot of muscle for the time spent.
• Stiff-leg deadlifts. Regular deadlifts no, stiff-leg yes.
• Unilateral lower body: Bulgarian split squats, single-leg leg press, hip thrusts. Train each side separately so the strong side does not bully the weak one.
• A lot of stretching. My upper body is genuinely flexible. My legs are wrecked. The stretching is non-negotiable.

I trained on machines for the first couple of weeks while my body remembered how to work at all. Then I moved to mostly free weights and calisthenics, which I think gives the best functional carryover, and which I prefer aesthetically because it builds the kind of physique that does things rather than just looks like it could.

The current Iron Man phase

Three full-body sessions a week. About 45 minutes of strength work, 5 minutes of boxing, 10 minutes of stretching, 1 km outside (I refuse to run on a treadmill, give me the Phuket heat instead).

The strength block:

• Pull-ups (currently at 4 clean reps, from a starting point of zero)
• Dips
• Stiff-leg deadlift
• Bulgarian split squat
• A finisher circuit: overhead press, biceps curl, hanging leg raises, lateral raises, hip thrusts

I superset most of it, because I want to be out of the gym in under an hour. 45 to 60 seconds rest. The hard stuff (deadlifts, anything heavy on the nervous system) gets full rest.

5 to 8 reps, 3 to 4 sets, almost everywhere.

The honest part

I am not training for the Iron Man race. I am training to fit inside an Iron Man suit. Those are very different goals, and I am genuinely grateful for the smaller one, because the actual Iron Man race would obliterate my hip in week one.

What I want you to take from this post is not the workout. The workout is mine, built around my body. The point is that the worst injury of my life happened when I was 14, the doctors who treated me said to stop forever, and they were not entirely wrong.

Maybe I have shortened the life of my hip by training instead of resting. I will probably need a hip replacement someday. Maybe at 45. Maybe at 60. But I would rather train and earn it earlier than spend my life waiting for the pain to not arrive.

The body has been mostly working for 15 years of unauthorized exercise. The back mostly does not hurt. The Iron Man suit on the printer does not care about my medical history.

I will take it.