Jason Derulo reflects on breaking his neck in the gym

Jason Derulo spoke in an interview with Paris Hilton on her podcast about a terrible accident in which he broke his neck and almost lost his life I am Paris Posted Monday.

“S— was crazy,” the “Whatcha Say” singer recalled the 2013 incident. “I had organized this tour – it was the biggest tour of my life at that point.”

To prepare for the tour, the singer trained with a coach who told him to do repeated backflips – for those who aren’t familiar, these are essentially backflips where the athlete jumps backwards, lands on their hands, and then pushes off the ground with their arms to land back on their feet.

“He had me do 50 back tucks in a row, which is one of the worst ideas anyone has ever had,” Derulo explained. “So I slipped on one of the back tucks and landed on my head, breaking the second vertebra in my neck.”

The singer said he immediately thought he might die from the injury.

“When it happened, I heard a loud crack and I just thought, ‘Holy shit, is that it? Is this how it all ends?'” he recalled. “And every thought imaginable was going through my head at that moment.”

Then Derulo remembered that his mother was waiting for him in the car outside the gym, and he went to great lengths to calm her concerns.

“I didn’t want to worry her, so after five minutes on the floor, I pulled myself together and walked to the car with my hands on my neck,” he said. “And then I said, ‘Mom, I think I hurt myself a little bit’ – so in this light voice – ‘I think I hurt myself a little bit inside, we should probably go to the hospital to get it checked out.'”

The trip to the doctor was a challenge, he said: “Now every single bump (in the car) feels like hell on earth. I’m dying in the passenger seat, but I don’t want her to notice.”

When he arrived at the hospital and underwent x-rays and other tests, the doctor came up with the diagnosis.

“Well, I have good news and bad news,” Derulo recalls the doctor saying. “The good news is that you have a gallows fracture, the same fracture that occurs when someone is hanged. And you’re still alive. This could have ended much worse: paralyzed or worse. That’s the good news, that you’re still with us and you can move all your limbs. The bad news is that you’re going to be out of action for seven months.”

That would have ruined the tour and Derulo felt terrible.

“I had to disappoint all these people,” he said. “I know how much this means to people. People are saving their money, their hard-earned money, and they want to be part of this experience. And suddenly all this crap went down the drain.”

However, during his recovery process, Derulo found a way to maintain his productivity.

“I created a routine: I got up in the morning, went to the gym and ran, I ran for about 45 minutes a day and then spent many hours in the studio,” he said. “Every day at the same time, in the same place, and that’s where I wrote my most successful album, which Talk dirty album that had ‘Talk Dirty,’ ‘Other Side,’ ‘Marry Me,’ ‘Wiggle’ – all kinds of hits from that album. That’s because I developed a routine, so it was like a normal thing in my life. When I’m able to really follow a routine, amazing things happen.”

Listen to the full conversation between Jason Derulo and Paris Hilton above.