What do Jonny Wilkinson (rugby), Michael Owen (football), Simon Jones and Michael Vaughan (cricket) have in common?

They are all suffering from long term injuries and are unable to help England in their respective sport. But why are so many sports people getting long term injuries? Well, the answer to this isn’t straight forward. The reason why a sports person would pick up injuries are numerous. It would always certainly be due to physical, mental, emotional and spiritual factors.

It’s very frustrating to see our sports teams performing badly whilst our best players are out injured. So what is the answer? The answer is a much more holistic approach looking at the person (not the symptoms) on a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual level. I truly believe that these injuries are preventable.

By using a mixture of corrective and high performance exerciseBodyTalkMetabolic Typing and the otherfoundational principles of health to build health from the ground up, balance their homeostatic control systems and facilitate their own amazing innate healing ability it is possible. Finding the imbalances within the body that were the causes of the problems and re-balancing them would be imperative. This I am sure would lead to long term health and top performance. After all this is how I work every day to help people recover from injuries.

I would love to see our sports stars conditioning programmes include a more holistic approach and more emphasis on injury prevention rather than a ‘band aid’ approach to patch ’em up and get ’em out on the field. I would also like to see more open-mindedness to some alternative techniques that have proven to be successful. There are some individual sports stars like Tiger Woods and Annika Sorenstam already doing this to great effect.