No pain no gain right?

After recovering from my first foot injury (or so I thought), I lacked the effortless speed and bounce I had before. I was transitioning to a slow player. By no means a bad player, but I couldn't easily go past people like I could before. Before, I was always the guy everyone was afraid to go into a tackle with or run against.

I was also the guy who could dribble effortlessly past people and had no problem scoring goals. While these things remained after this first injury, it just wasn't the same. I would bet that many of you know this feeling.

True Healing

Looking back, I realize how many nights I used to spend icing the area on the inside of my ankle because of how aggravated and inflamed it always was. All based on the false notion that I needed to deal away with the inflammation with cold. Little did I know that that inflammation was my body's natural healing method.

The human body sends nutrients urgently to an area to heal it most effectively. Our body is so smart and intelligent, but modern science instead convinces us that the human body is dumb and needs constant supplementation and intervention. Many times a niggling injury never goes away because you are unknowingly restricting the healing process by doing something we're told to believe will actually help.

Treating the Root Cause

Even more so, little did I know that I needed to treat the root cause of my pain. I needed to question why my body was so beat up and not recovering. I needed think why this little bone all of sudden was aggravated. I needed to ask myself if going to bed at 12PM and then waking up at 5AM to run to school and play indoor for two hours was a smart idea. I really needed to ask myself if then working out again later that day before I went to club practice was a smart idea.

Then, coming home to eat dinner at 10PM and do homework until 12PM, and then I did it all over again week after week, month after month. In the moment, All I could think of was the "no pain, no gain" mantra shoved down the throats of every aspiring athlete by big business and sports companies. I didn't question these things. It would require more pain and suffering until these thoughts even entered my mind.

I viewed this foot injury merely as a speedbump and pushed on with my ways of endlessly training in the garage under bright artificial lights sometimes until midnight. I would then have a bowl of cereal accompanied by FIFA until 1 or 2AM.

My lifestyle has almost flipped to what it is now. I chuckle, thinking back to all the things I did without care or constraint. I realize now the sum of all my habits in high-school combined with my insane work ethic led to the worsening of many of the problems I was trying to fix.

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When you spend so much treating the symptoms, you can forget about what is really going on underneath. When all you think is about how much you can sacrifice, you forget what you're there to gain.

When you just cover up or block out the pain, you inevitably just push that pain to somewhere else in the body and spend some time feeling a little better until it comes back worse. The way you beat whack-a-mole is to stop playing.

Around this time, I was 16 or 17 years old. There was a change in youth football here in California, and I made the move to academy football from club. I played at an academy called Strikers Academy for 1 year. It was a place that gifted me another experience that pushed me along the path. I had a coach who literally called me a Sunday league player in front of the whole academy. He had all the players from the U16 and U18 Academy huddled around him in the airport on the way back home. This was off the back of me actually playing quite well starting at striker in a showcase tournament in Texas. On the face of it, it sounds terrible. It does remind you of that coach who never stops yelling and never has anything positive to say, and there are plenty of those coaches.

Looking back though, it was the harsh truth I needed to hear to my face. It was the harsh truth my other coaches never had the nerve to tell me. I might have wanted to tell this dude to STFU in the moment, but in the long run, I'm thankful. It woke me up from a blissful ignorance.

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I needed to again raise my standards. I needed to look better on the field as well as perform better.  It was this interaction that set me down the path of gym work, resistance training, and eventually outright bodybuilding.

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To be continued...