As any avid sports enthusiast will know, downtime is just as important as hitting the gym and being active. You need to give your body enough time to recover from what you put it through each day – and if you don’t, you’ll soon start to feel it. So the lesson here is listen to your body… or you could soon find that you’re out of commission forever.
Take a leaf out of tennis ace Andy Murray’s book. In his regular BBC Sport column, the sportsman said that not playing at Wimbledon this year was actually the best decision that he could have made and he has no regrets about it whatsoever.
He explained that his hip was bad when he played last year and even though he succeeded in getting to the quarter-finals, he ended up missing an entire year of sport because of it.
Murray had this to say: “I didn’t want to go in this year, potentially play four or five matches, and do any damage. Obviously, I was very disappointed I wasn’t able to play, but I wasn’t going to win the tournament and I wasn’t well enough prepared.
“It was a hard decision but a smart one. The positive things were being able to spend some more time with the family while I’m here at home and being able to practise on the hard courts.”
It’s impossible to prevent sports injuries from happening all the time – sport is naturally very unpredictable! But you can help protect yourself by warming up properly, using the correct equipment and focusing on ensuring that your technique is on point… which your local Manchester running coach can certainly help with!
