I’m not really sure how the question arose, but I was chatting to one of our clients the other day and she asked me what advice I would give (or rather, would have given) to my 22-year-old self.

Now I’m not really the kind of person who looks back at the past and wishes that things had been different. My brother and I are much more interested in what we can change today and how we can improve our lives, and the lives of people around us for the future.

But it got me thinking back to my 22-year-old self.That certainly seems like a long time ago. Steve and I were playing rugby at the time. We’ve always been pretty disciplined, so healthy eating, training and exercise have always been part of our lives.

I’m not going to lie and say we never had one too many on the odd occasion, or had fun indulging at Christmas or on our birthday, but generally speaking, we just enjoyed feeling fit and healthy and knew that it was important long term.

The Importance of Recovery

One thing I would say though is that when you’re young, you tend to feel invincible. I know that I did. I never thought very seriously about all those injuries I was getting on the rugby field and how they would affect me in the long run.

I just kept playing through the pain. We all did. But believing that we were superhuman was somewhat immature, to say the least, and training the day after dislocating my shoulder was darn right stupid.

So I suppose that if I had the chance to speak to my 22-year-old self, I would stress the importance of recovery and rehabilitation. Whether I would have listened or not is another story.

Avoid Chronic Health Conditions

Recovery is vital in exercise and not stretching properly or giving your body the time it needs to heal is what leads to chronic health conditions or operations. My not taking my injuries seriously enough is the reason I had to have an operation on my shoulder at thirty; an operation that most likely, could have been avoided.

That’s actually what led us to develop our strong recovery protocols at the DVCC. Because the worst thing you can do with any injury is to ignore it, we attack them head on with the right rehabilitation and working recovery into our workout sessions.

Don’t Over-train

Overtraining without proper recovery can lead to injuries, prolonged soreness and a decrease in your training performance. If you train too much and don’t build recovery in to your workout, there’s a much higher chance of sustaining injury, which means that you’ll have to stop training for a while and may even place your long term health at risk. Skipping recovery because you think you don’t have time isn’t going to do you any favours in the long run.