Latest / The Uplift- with Luke Pollock / #30 - Solo Pod - The Self Help Trap and Elite Sport Rehab
Transcript
- Luke Pollock: Hello and welcome back to the Uplift Podcast. I'm your host, Luke, back with another solo podcast today. And I'm gonna just be speaking about some of my learnings from this week and also answering a question or two from Instagram, my Instagram listeners. However, I did just put the reel or the Instagram story question thing out about ten minutes ago. And only 60 people have seen it so far because I've been on my stories quite a lot today. So it might just be that I answer one question that's come in and talk to you about what I've been struggling with this week and what I've been learning this week. Overall, been a great week. yeah, I just love this week so far. Been major, major appreciation of self-employment. But also rugby's back. Rugby is back. So our first game is this weekend and My osteatis pubis is finally, finally calming down, which is so good. So for reference, I struggled with this since about November, October last year. And it's pretty much your symphysis pubis bones become inflamed. and it just feels like you've got chronic groin pain whenever you run. And it get it got really bad around Christmas time. So post Christmas, I was probably playing seven, eight, eighty percent of my max and was thinking I was gonna have to start pulling out of games. And then it sort of settled off as I learned how to manage and deal with it a little bit more. around March, April time and then into summer I tried to rest quite a lot and then tried to build back my capacity. So start pre season it was quite sore for the first few sessions. But I think we've hit a sweet spot where I I've learned what rehab exercises really work for me, what really makes a difference a pitch prep wise. And yeah. And also we've changed our surface that we're training on, which has made a massive difference for me as well. So all is well in that side of things. We've got our first pre season game this year. very competitive in the club, which is which is great. It's making me train harder and yeah, prep prep more intensely during the week, which is like where you want to be ultimately. You want to be somewhere that pushes you and somewhere that challenges you. so yeah, it's been a really cool week and I'm enjoying learning. It's like improving in my rugby. And I I would question anyone who isn't enjoying their sport right now is just try and find a way to improve day on day. If you're not enjoying it, And you're not getting picked, and there's loads of stuff that you can't control. Just find a way to improve day on day. When I was least enjoying my rugby, it's when I knew I wasn't getting any better and I felt stuck. So just try and improve day on day. But anyway, that's a little bit of a tangent. I want to share with you because I know people who listen to this like my book recommendations, et cetera. It's not a book recommendation, but this Monday I was like stressed, trying to do a million different ones, a million and one different things. And ultimately it came back to the fact I had other people's idea of what my day should look like running around my head. Because I've read quite a lot of self help books and because from twenty twenty to twenty twenty six or twenty nineteen really, I've read loads of different self help books and I've tried to get gain the edge in loads of different areas in my life. What you find now is that these self help books often, very, very frequently will contradict themselves. So a book like Four Thousand Weeks will tell you to Enjoy every day, take it for what it is. And then a book like a hundred million dollar offers by Alex or Mosey will tell you, you know, you need to grind, you need to go more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. So these books are inherently contradictory with one another because the authors don't plan it, right? And there's lots of different ways to achieve the same goal. That's what you need to remember. So it's hard to it's hard to remember that when you're in the thick of it and you've got all these different things going around your head. And it sounds crazy saying this at half eight or nine PM on a Wednesday night, but Like it will literally be for me now, like I haven't got as much done this morning as I would have liked to have got done. Like, I'm a bit lazy. I've been lazy this morning. I I should be able to make more videos. Do I really want this bad enough? Like all these negative self-chat will come through my head and I'm almost using the advice I've been given against myself, which is not is which is not what it was designed to do. So if you're that type of person, be conscious of what you consume and be conscious of letting it soak in. I met up with my good friend and he said, just let it pass through. You gotta let some of this stuff pass through. The good stuff you'll take on and other stuff, just let it pass through. And I think more recently I've been taking too much of it in and trying to take everyone's advice. And it comes down to the business as well. You know, people will say, you know, you need to create a higher take it offer and have less clients on. So make it make your offer more expensive for less people. And other people say, No, make it cheaper for more people. And like there's obviously multiple ways to skin the same car, but it's With social media, with books, with podcasts, we can become and I can become addicted to just taking in information to try and solve my next problem, which is good. It's a good way to be. You wanna you wanna solve problems, but ultimately it can make you paralyzed and stuck. And you kinda do have to trust your gut with a lot of these things. And I think that's what the the old guys had advantage over us on. They didn't have as much information to take in, so they just took aggressive action and then course corrected on the way. Yeah, so then I was on Monday night, I was like, this this day's got on top of me a little bit. And I remember Tim Ferris had written written a blog on the self-help trap. And I'm just gonna read you a little extract from that blog now. I would really, really recommend if you've resonated with anything I've just rambled about for the past five minutes, that you go and read this blog. It will take you like ten minutes. I read it twice on Monday. I'm gonna take Give you a little extract from it now. So self-help is dangerous precisely because it easily becomes self-fixation. A focus on improving the self usually first requires finding problems with the self. This is quite the pickle. In a society that rewards problem solving, you can end up hallucinating or exaggerating on ease in order to fix it. This leaves you always in the red, always one step behind. Imagine the dog chasing its tail that is committed to being unhappy until it catches its tail. Because it's always a few inches short. Still it whirls around and round in quotations, doing the work. Perfection always recedes by one more book, one more seminar, one more habit tracker. And it's so true. I haven't got my daily journal done today. I haven't got my habit tracker done. I haven't exercised today. I haven't closed a new client today. I haven't made the income target today. I haven't made a rail. I haven't progressed the business in XYZ, and I haven't gone out for Food with my wife. I haven't done all these things. And it's like these boxes that we have to tick because we're constantly chasing our tail, trying to chase some unattainable goal. And when you're in that spiral, you gotta think, Am I thinking about myself too much? And the answer is yes. self-help so easily becomes self-fixation. And honestly, just taking a step away from it has all been so good. It's just opening the Bible again and re-rooting myself. and taking myself away from myself has been really, really helpful. This this podcast is also for me. I hope you can appreciate that I will be revisiting this when I feel this in. Revisiting this blog definitely I've downloaded it onto my Kindle. so yeah, really, really helpful really really helpful article which I read this week twice and I will be revisiting time and time again. First question through on the Instagram reel or on the Instagram story, and I'm probably just gonna answer this question to be honest, because I quite like it as a question. And it was why do elite physios struggle to transfer across to elite settings? Okay, this is a player that's asked this and he has been in a lot of elite settings in the past. I know this player personally. Okay. So why do elite physios struggle to transfer that across to elite settings? Loads of different reasons, and please I need a caveat. It's my own podcast, but I'll caveat anyway. I know I'm a young physio, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know all. I don't know the ins and outs. Whatever. This is how I see it. The rules to the game, which whichever game you're playing, and the rules within medical teams and elite settings are quite rigid. So you have little, very little space to experiment and find your way of doing things. You ha you're constrained by timelines and you're constrained by pressure. You're also constrained by what? your higher up your boss does. So if you want to go in and get creative with a rehab, you might you might have a little bit of leeway, but in terms of timelines, it better work. Otherwise you're gonna be in the rad. Why is this player not back? Why are they ranger, et cetera? So the creativity element, which I always talk about, like rehab, good rehab is an art form and it should be enjoyed as an art form. It should be experimented and played around like a painter would paint a painting. It should not be constructed like a piece of scaffolding. That this block fits in here and this block fits in here because we're not scaffolding, we're dealing with humans. So it is more like painting than it is scaffolding. I'm gonna use that for a bit of content. But it's so true. We are we're artists, we're not scaffolders, we're not construction workers, we don't put blocks into here and here. We're not like the surgeons, okay? They're dealing with very physical things. We're dealing with the emotional person that we're seeing in front of us. And sometimes the elite settings don't give you enough time to respect that and to enjoy that and to get to dive deeper into that. Sometimes it is just let's let's give a him exercises on an Excel spreadsheet, because I've got twelve more players to see today. And that is not the physio's fault and it's not the players' fault, it's the system's fault. And ultimately the system is designed around maximizing profit for the clubs. And that is seen as maybe not investing as much in the medical team. And that's seen the as getting as much as we possibly can from players. So we will push, push, push players to play more often, to play more regularly and to play harder. And we will try and scrimp on medical resources where possible and get by in different ways. And I'm not talking about my club. I'm talking about elite level sport. Okay. My club is part-time. So I'm talking about elite level sport. And this goes right the way up. You think it gets better at different levels? It doesn't. Okay. I've talked to physio's players from the highest levels of clubs in England and beyond. It doesn't. There there's a phrase it's idiots the whole way up and it it's it's true. Okay. Obviously you will get looked after better if you're playing for the British and Irish Lions and if you're playing for a League Three club, but ultimately it's not there's not as much of a comparison difference as you think there is. and it is very dependent on the individual as well, I would say. Like you're some absolutely unbelievable physios that would be privileged to learn from in these settings. But there's also some people who maybe aren't as confident but fit the mold of the environment very well. And that's the next thing I wanna say is fitting the mold of the environment is very important. So do the other medical staff like you will the will the players like you? Will the coaching staff like you? That is very, very important. And that holds a lot more weight than just knowledge base. So will will they like you and will they like the way you do things, the way you cooperate? That also holds a lot of weight. I'm really doing myself out of ever working in the lead sport, but I'm not I'm not really. I'm just saying this is how I see it from the outside. you gotta kinda go get on with it and get on with the program a little bit because it it makes sense. It allows the the whole machine to to run a lot more smoothly. Third thing I would say is you can climb the ladder without having your skills tested too much. So things like diagnostics and strapping and stuff will be tested. And those are the that's the sort of stuff that I would struggle with more. But things like really, really top-end rehab might not be tested as much. And this is where players I feel are being let down right the way up. Whether that's just in Local clubs or even at elite level, sometimes rehabs just don't have the time commitment that they need because the physios and the medical staff are stretched so thin because of what I've mentioned. we're in a capitalist society which unfortunately promotes budget constraints on stuff like medical and will try and squeeze players tighter through timelines. So we don't have the luxury of time of playing around with these things. And it's often you see players go for like a rehab camp with maybe Bill Knowles in America, or I I know a retail will get some guys on rehab camps and they normally do really well just because the physio or the SNC coach has one-on-one time to spend the whole day with that player, which professional teams don't have the luxury of. They are often constrained, they have to see multiple players on on the same day. So there's just a few thoughts to why like professional physios struggle to transfer that over to elite settings. My last thing on that is a lot of these physios wouldn't have been in the setting themselves, so they won't understand acutely how much pressure that player feels or how worried or how anxious they might be coming into into a different setting. For example, one of my clients was seeing a different physio, not me, and he reported the physio saying, like, I don't understand why why it's not work. I'm not gonna get into the details on this podcast, but he's pretty much saying, I don't understand why you're not better. And I get what the physio was meaning. He was saying I've kind of tried all my ideas, but so I'm kind of out of ideas to to what is going on. But he just worded it in a way which almost reflected back on the patient or the client or the athlete in this point, in this case, that it was his fault. And this is what I'm saying, that you need to understand what goes on in athletes' brains. And if you're an athlete, you get that a lot more. Like you understand acutely by saying, I don't understand what's wrong with you. Almost feels like, this is my fault. I'm broken. It's It's my fault. And actually, as physios clinicians, we're supposed to take some of the weight off the athlete's shoulders in that setting. I hope this has come across in the right way. Like I say, I've never actually worked for an elite sports team. I've been in the elite setting quite a lot and I've seen behind the curtain in those settings and I've also I'm also friends with lots of players in those settings. So I see that it isn't perfect. It's definitely not terrible either. I maybe made it sound worse than it is, but sometimes physios and athletes alike will think this is the gold standard, this is the pinnacle of where we need to reach. And quite often it's not actually. You'd be surprised and shocked at how time constraints and how resource constraints can impact even the very, very top physios as well. And and I'm honestly genuinely not talking about anyone in particular. The physios that I've shadowed in elite settings have actually been awesome and ru I've learned so much from. but it's just more from like a playing perspective, talking to other guys and what they've experienced and long-term injuries and how they've coped with it. that's that's sort of more what I'm going off here. But yeah, this is a nice short podcast for you. I'm actually just gonna ask check and see if I've got any more questions. Here we go. Questions, questions, questions. No, I do not have any more questions. So I'm not gonna make up one. I'm gonna go read my book because I really wanna do that. And I've been watching Ted Lasso this evening. before d this podcast because I was just like, I wanna chill out before recording. And I'm very glad I did. because yeah, it made me feel a lot better. I hope you've all watched Ted Lasso. It's so good. I'm really enjoying it. And I'm gonna go read a new book today. And just on the self help bit and the closing bit, if you feel like you're being unproductive ever, don't worry. I am too today. Woke up, slept in a little bit till about nine, got coffee, dandered into town, got my hair cut, went into a bookstore for a bit, read a book, bought a book, came home, didn't really start work till like one PM today. So hence why I'm working late, but that is the self-employment life. You can kind of s pick your own schedule. So if you're if you're feeling like you're being unproductive lately, don't worry. Same here. And and sometimes that's needed and sometimes that is good. We don't want to get in the self-help trap. but thank you so much for listening as always. And if you enjoyed the episode, please follow the podcast and leave a five-star review as well. It really helps me out, boosts it up, gets more people listening, and allows me to see that people are enjoying it as well. So thank you so much for listening. if you've got any questions, message me at LookPollock Online and have a great evening. Bye.