by Derek Hough
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13
PUSHING THROUGH THE PAIN
WHEN I LIVED with the Ballases, being sick was never really an option. I remember one time, when I first moved there, I was feeling under the weather. My head hurt, my nose was stuffed, and I had a scratchy throat. Shirley came into my bedroom to ask me if I was okay.
“No, not really,” I groaned. “I’m sick.”
She handed me a glass of water and patted me on the head: “Outta bed. Off to school. You’re fine.”
Shirley held herself to the same standards. She didn’t allow herself to be sick. Growing up in the projects of Liverpool, she’d had this ingrained in her. If you got sick, then you couldn’t make your money, and if you couldn’t make your money, you couldn’t make rent. But her grin-and-bear-it mentality was very different from how my family handled illness in Utah. As a little kid, I got sick all the time, and my mom doted on me. She was such a nurturer and a giver. I loved getting all that attention and a day off from school. If I said I was sick, she didn’t doubt it. She coddled me and nursed me back to health.
England was the exact opposite. If I had the flu, Shirley would give me a throat lozenge and usher me off on the train to school. There was just no sympathy.
“If you can’t go to school, then you can’t go to rehearsals. And if you can’t go to rehearsals, you can’t do the competitions,” she reminded me. And just like that, my body obeyed. I literally never got sick when I was there because I knew I had work to do.
But I still harbored my old hypochondriac ways—at least when it came to competition day. If I wasn’t dancing very well, I would think that my back was out or my hip was hurting or my shoulder was off. I always had some ache or pain, and it became a running joke among my coaches: “Okay, Derek, what’s wrong today?” Shirley actually carried a box of bandages, aspirin, antibiotics—an entire arsenal of cures for whatever might be ailing me. I gave myself all these excuses for why I wasn’t at my best. That way, if I didn’t win, I had an ailment to blame. It was my defense mechanism, a way of dealing with my nerves and buffering myself from any disappointment. But after being constantly teased by my coaches, I started to look at all the other competitors and how they handled pain. They all had injuries, but they never talked about them. They just got on with it. I thought about it: Maybe I should give the stoic thing a try? Maybe I should stop making excuses and own my performance? When I did stop complaining, my body healed itself a lot quicker. I learned that the more I focused attention on an ailment or injury, the longer it stayed around. I’m not saying to ignore your health problems—just don’t dwell on them. Acknowledge there’s a problem, deal with it, then move on.
Maria Menounos taught me an amazing lesson about enduring. It was during our first dance, the cha-cha. There’s a move in the beginning where she goes over my leg and I twist her, then she goes into another dip. A week before the premiere, we were practicing that move, but when I twisted her, she landed on my knee and cracked two ribs. Another person might have said, “That’s it, we’re finished here,” but not Maria. She had her ribs taped up and went right back to work. She even joked about it: “Obviously, Derek’s knee is very hard and my ribs are very soft.” I was worried about her, but she kept saying, “We are not talking about this! We are dancing. I am having the best time of my life and I need to power through.” When she got home, she’d ice her ribs or soak in a bath of Epson salts. As if that weren’t bad enough, our second dance was the quick step, a dance with lots of jumping around and bouncing on the feet. In the middle of rehearsing, Maria fractured both feet pretty badly—three toes on her left foot and two on her right. Every day she would have work with Extra, then go straight to the hospital to have injections and get her feet wrapped. I teased her, “Careful, Grandma!” but I was in utter awe of her dedication and work ethic. She never once complained, even when I saw the pain on her face. Her doctors advised her to stop dancing, and she wouldn’t. The woman is a fighter, and she genuinely wanted to be there, to learn, and to do well. She wasn’t going to let anything hold her back from it.
But sometimes you do have to sit one out in order to heal. For me, that’s a worse agony than physical pain. I never want to let anyone down, and I hate when my body doesn’t cooperate. But I experienced this during DWTS: All-Stars when I was dancing with Shawn Johnson. I woke up one morning in agony. I had been doing a lot of tricks and lifts with her, so my body was taking a beating. I could actually feel my bones rubbing together in my neck, and it scared me. The doctor ran some tests and ordered me to take a week off.
“I don’t really do that,” I told him. But he was pretty insistent. This was a bad enough injury that if I didn’t rest up, it would get a lot worse. I could wind up completely immobilized. I later found out that I have bone spurs in my neck from my years of dancing and whipping my head around. When the bone calcifies and heals, it creates extra bone on top of the bone. It closes the gap, but there’s a small opening for the nerves to get through. The excruciating pain I was feeling was the nerves rubbing against the bone.
So for once, I took the doctor’s advice and sat the week out. I don’t know what hurt worse—the pain in my neck, or the feeling that I was letting Shawn down. I didn’t want her to pick up on that, so I tried to hide it and pretend it didn’t bother me. Sometimes the pain isn’t only physical, it’s mental as well. In this case, I had to power through my disappointment and frustration to keep my partner going. I owed it to her; I owed to myself. Shawn told me she had never seen me look so heartbroken and frustrated. But I shook it off, just like the flu when I was a kid. Mark, her previous partner, stepped in, and I choreographed the routine so I could still be a part of it even if I couldn’t dance it. Instead of focusing on the negative of having to take the week off, I focused on the positive: “You guys are going to do a fantastic job and I’ll be back next week to finish what we started.” I’ve always performed, so for me not to be on the stage was a weird sensation. But I still felt the adrenaline rush. In a way, choreographing was even more nerve-racking than dancing. There was no control: I had to send them off and hope for the best. In the end, Shawn and Mark didn’t let me down: they got a perfect 30. And I learned that even though I was injured, I wasn’t useless. I could still be creative and feel a genuine sense of fulfillment.
It’s a fact that a dancer’s career is not forever. Eventually, if you dance hard and you dance often, your body is going to rebel. I do dance hard and often, but I don’t think about that. I know there may come a point where I won’t be able to do what I do now. I know a lot of pros who retire in their thirties. I’ve seen it and wondered, What if . . . ? But I keep it way, way in the back of my mind. Instead, I look for ways to defy age and keep my body strong and limber. I learn as much as I can about nutrition and exercise and I keep moving forward. Life is truly a series of transitions, from one season to another, from one phase to another.
I’m glad I had this experience of being injured, because I could draw on it when I was partnered with Amber Riley in Season 17. The Glee star had a problem with her knees from day one of our dancing. “I have really weak ankles and bad knees,” she told me the minute she walked into the studio. So we kept an eye on that, but as we were going on, I noticed that Amber’s body posture was all slouched over. When she would walk, she was giving in to that pain in her knees. She hung her head down and rounded her shoulders—what I like to refer to as “defeatist pose.” But I could see right off the bat that Amber could move. I believed in her potential.
“I don’t want you to use the knees as a crutch,” I explained to her. “It’s not an excuse to be second best. Yeah, you need to take the pressure off them, and there are certain things you need to do to protect yourself and to prevent further injury. But you have to get your head in the game.” Week 4’s tango was one of our hardest dances. We went to the doctor and he recommended draining the fluid out of her knees. Amber couldn’t even start dancing till the Friday before Monday night’s live show. Th
ere were lots of tears and lots of frustration: “It hurts to even sit down,” she told me. “I don’t want to disappoint anybody.” We tangoed to Kanye’s “Love Lockdown” and it was scorching (and earned us three 9s from the judges, including my sis Julianne, who was one tough guest judge/critic).
The samba in week 6 scared the hell out of Amber because it was so fast and the moves were a lot more complicated. We were also at the halfway mark—time to up our game. “I’m your rock, your support, your barre—whatever you need me to be,” I assured her. “Whenever things go wrong, you stay strong.” We got two 10s from Carrie Ann and Bruno, and an 8 from Len (what can I say? He found it a “tad repetitive”). The next week’s paso doble really kicked our butts: my back was killing me, and Amber’s shoulders were aching from holding the paso stance. By week 9, she had to go to the hospital and learned that she had torn a tendon in her knee. Could anything else go wrong? But I took a deep breath and shifted gears: “We just want to make sure we can finish the experience and finish it right,” I told her. I had to change my strategy and create intricate choreography that would also save her knees. I choreographed a jazz routine that she could do sitting behind a desk.
There were a couple of times Amber told me or texted me that she thought she might need to quit. The word forfeit kept coming up. I wouldn’t let her, just like Shirley had refused to let me stay home in bed “sick.” It had always been Amber’s pattern in the past: get sick or get injured and pull out. I wasn’t going to allow her to continue down that path although I understood where she was coming from. I realized part of her pain was emotional—I could see it in the way she carried herself. I drove her nuts about her posture. I had to convince her that just standing tall would give her a whole new outlook. When you stand tall, your testosterone levels go up and your stress levels go down. I was constantly barking at Amber to stand up straight and “lift it up.” I know I pissed her off, but eventually, she did it naturally. And when she did, her whole face brightened and her moves became faster and more confident. She found the determination and the strength to push through it. She’s a warrior. By week 10, she got her fire back, just in time for the finals. “Amber Riley’s back in the house!” I told her.
When we hit the finale, it was all about her taking the lead. Six fierce pros, and she completely commanded that dance floor. Bruno said it best: “You’re a true leading lady.” When we won the Mirror Ball, she bawled: “I didn’t know if I could do it, but you can do whatever you put your mind to!” Mission accomplished.
It’s one thing to work with a stranger on overcoming her pain. It’s another thing entirely when that person is your mom. A few months ago, my mother passed out and hit her head. We’re not really sure why, but she wound up in the hospital for a few days while the doctors made sure it was nothing serious. She was okay, just very shaken up by it. A few weeks went by, and she came to stay with me at my place in L.A. I saw a change in her—and it worried me. She was taking a lot of naps and complaining about getting old (FYI, she’s only fifty-six!). This wasn’t the woman I knew. My mom was always a ball of energy. She had had five kids and never slowed down for a second. Where was this coming from?
“Come on, you’re not that old,” I teased her. “Stop saying that to yourself.”
“I’m tired,” she sighed. “I need to rest.”
I didn’t want to aggravate her, especially after the scare she’d been through, but I wasn’t buying it. I don’t believe you reach a certain age where you just sit down and wait for yourself to decay. I thought what she needed was a little kick in the butt to get her back up and running. So I cranked up the music—“#thatPOWER” by Will.i.am—as loud as I could and dragged her up to dance with me. We were jumping up and down and twirling around, acting like idiots nonstop for ten minutes. It reminded me of our early days at home in our family kitchen, grooving to the oldies station on the radio. When I turned off the music, she was smiling and breathing hard.
“Okay, you can take your nap now,” I told her.
“What? Are you kidding me? Let’s go do something. Let’s go outside. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go jog. I want to do anything but take a nap.”
I smiled. “Isn’t that interesting. One minute you want to take a nap, and the next you don’t want to stop moving?”
I sat her down and we had a heart-to-heart. “Mom, you’re always trying to be this supermom,” I told her. “But you also need to be Marriann. You don’t have to do everything for everyone. You’re a person, too.”
I went out and bought her this beige leather jacket with studs on the shoulders. She looked fifteen years younger in it, and she felt it. I took her out to a party at a club for iHeartRadio and she was up till 7 A.M., dancing like a maniac. My friends couldn’t get over it: “Your mom is amazing! She’s so full of life!” That’s the mom I knew. I simply had to reintroduce her to that self she’d forgotten. She was married at twenty, so she lost out on a lot of her carefree, young years. Time to make up for it! As for the tired-old-lady bit? I was having none of that! You are who you think you are, and in my mother’s case, it’s definitely hot stuff.
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GET MOVING
People are often scared of the word exercise. We associate the word with pain, and we think of it as a chore. (And it can be—who likes going to the gym at 6 A.M.?) If that’s how you’re thinking, then you need to change your psychology. I don’t think of my body in terms of exercise; I think in terms of movement. Look at the actual word—I see it as “meant to move.” As human beings, going back to the beginning of civilization, we’ve had to move to survive. We had to throw spears to hunt, we had to prepare land to plant seeds, we had to gather firewood. Our bodies are hardwired to move. Not even TiVo can rewire those thousands of years of DNA. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s easy to forget: your body is connected to your mind and spirit.
People say, “I’m miserable because I’m overweight” or “I’m overweight because I’m miserable,” but these two go hand in hand. I know when I drink to excess or put poisons in my body, the next day I’m not going to feel happy or inspired. The body is the vehicle that can help you reach your dreams. Keeping it moving, strong, and healthy paves the way to overall well-being. You can’t say you love yourself when you abuse yourself physically, and by not using your body, you’re abusing it.
But here’s the first piece of good news: you don’t have to be in the gym to exercise. You just need to move—and keep moving. It can be anywhere, at any time. Sometimes I’ll do push-ups during a commercial break while watching TV. Sometimes I take a short walk, even around the block with my dog, just to break up my day. Your body wants to move; your body was created to move. You have to feed that. When you’re feeling miserable, your body is telling you to get on your feet. Moving makes you feel good. It helps you slay the demon of procrastination that lurks in the shadow of every human being. Most of us sleepwalk through life because we’re waiting for the perfect time, the perfect place, and the perfect opportunity to improve ourselves. Stop waiting. Start moving and keep moving.
Find small pockets of time.
I like to set aside five minutes in the morning to squeeze in some push-ups and crunches. Just starting the morning like that changes my whole day. If you can find at least five minutes to do something that helps your body, you will already start feeling stronger. It will get your metabolism in gear, and that will benefit you all day. If you’re too busy, get creative by doing something active during your lunch break, taking the stairs, or lifting hand weights while you watch TV at night. Start living by this rule: a little of anything is better than nothing.
Keep in mind the rewards ahead.
Workouts provide awesome internal rewards; after a long dance practice or gym workout I always have more energy and a clearer mind, and I’m able to focus on things I need to get done. But we all know it’s hard to remember that great feeling when you’re headed off to the gym, dreading the work ahead. Conjuring that ecstatic state of mind you
know you’ll find later can be a tremendous motivator. If you prefer external rewards, motivate yourself with baby steps every day to hit a bigger long-term goal—one with a luxurious reward as your prize. Once you’ve reached it, allow yourself to follow through with whatever reward it was that motivated you, whether it’s a great glass of wine or a Sunday movie marathon.
Make exercising fun.
The same old routine at the gym can be a drag. It’s good to mix it up. In addition to dancing I also enjoy hiking and swimming. And when you work out, do it someplace you find inspiring: a hike that brings you to a gorgeous view or a workout in the sand with the surf in your sight, even a small grassy spot in your backyard or a serene, uncluttered corner of your apartment. Recreational team sports also add variety to the mix: they put the focus on the fun of the game rather than the pain of the effort.
Cheat (sometimes).
Eating healthily is a part of my lifestyle, but I’m no superhuman. My Kryptonite is at the movie theater. I can’t go to the movies unless I have popcorn (with butter and salt, of course), and I’ll also get nachos with extra cheese and jalapeños, then some M&Ms, water, and a root beer if I really want to get crazy. It’s okay to cheat . . . provided you do it only occasionally. If you never allow yourself to cheat, you put too much pressure on yourself and doom yourself to failure. Work hard and practice hard, but it’s okay to cut yourself a break now and then.
How to stick with it.
Inertia is a real thing. Momentum will build. When you do something often enough it becomes a ritual, like going to church or brushing your teeth. You will eventually recondition your body to crave working out and eating the right foods. The circuitry can be rewired. There’s the trigger, the process, and the reward. The key is to get it to the point where it’s such a habit, you want to do it. Let’s take a real-life example that all of us have faced: we haven’t been to the gym in a while, we feel sluggish, and we don’t want to go. The idea of lacing up the sneakers and hitting the gym feels like torture. The trick is to remind yourself that at the end of that workout, your mind will actually feel pleasure. It feels good. Sometimes we get brainwashed into thinking that Gym = Pain, Candy = Pleasure when really it’s the opposite: without fail, our bodies feel better after they’ve been in motion.