If you're going to face down a 30-foot wall of water armed with nothing but a surfboard, you'd best be someone who's not afraid of a little danger—either that, or someone who's ready to learn from potentially injurious failure. Turns out big wave surfing champion Laird Hamilton is a little of both.

Now on APTA's Move Forward Radio: an interview with Hamilton, who's made an international name for himself as, yes, a fearless surfer but also as an athlete who, in his own words, has survived his body being "torn, punctured, ripped, scraped, broken…you name it." It's those injuries, he says, that have enabled him to learn more about his own body and the importance of staying active, even when things aren't at 100%.

Hamilton remembered the lessons he had learned through his surfing injuries and applied them to his preparation for—and recovery from—hip replacement surgery. In the podcast, he describes how he avoided pain medicine of any kind during the process, and how he surprised his health care team with one of the fastest recoveries they had ever seen. He also tells Move Forward Radio that he drew no small amount of inspiration from his wife, volleyball star Gabby Reece, who was featured on 2016 podcast to talk about her drug-free recovery from a total knee replacement (performed the same day as Hamilton's hip operation, by the way).

Move Forward Radio is archived at MoveForwardPT.com, APTA's official consumer information website, and can be streamed online or downloaded as a podcast via iTunes.