“Wim, I have to cancel our training.”

On the phone was a long-time client: he was in tremendous pain, crawling into bed and hurting even while lying still. He had an appointment with his doctor to see what could be done. I already knew the answer:

Nothing.

His injuries are beyond fixing. He will live in increasing pain for the rest of his years, with low quality of life, his body gradually becoming his prison. The only thing medicine has left for him is trying to manage the pain and eventually failing to do so.

This could have been avoided. From day one, I repeatedly explained the consequences of his choices: not doing rehab after surgeries, ignoring pain, and pushing through it, doing physical efforts his surgeons specifically told him to avoid. He ignored it all and usually replied along the lines of “Don’t be a pussy.”

Now here we are.

The information below isn’t new, but many, like my client, dismiss it until it’s too late. Many of you reading this will do so too. I get that because I ignored it too when I was younger. Though I’m not as far gone as my client, I do suffer the consequences of my stubbornness. That said, this article has only one purpose:

To reach the small portion of readers who *will* take action and hopefully avoid this bad outcome later in life.

The advice below applies to everyone, regardless of lifestyle or fitness level. Obviously, I’m coming at this from the perspective of 40 years of hardcore martial arts and self-defense training. Make no mistake: if you train in those, getting injured is not “if” but “when.”  If you compete, you’ll probably collect many injuries that you constantly have to manage. It’s unavoidable in this field, so what I explain goes twice as hard for martial artists and self-defense enthusiasts.

That said, let’s dig in.

How to stay healthy throughout your entire life

I’ve been a personal trainer for over 30 years, teaching and training hundreds of people in martial arts, self-defense, strength, and conditioning. I also often became a third-level care provider after clients had surgery or an injury. I have worked closely with people at every life stage, from children to the elderly. Many clients have trained with me for decades, allowing me to observe how their bodies evolved over the long haul. This experience taught me valuable lessons about staying healthy throughout life.

Here are four key mental models to help you make good choices about health and longevity.

1) The lifespan blind spot

It’s hard to imagine your full lifespan, especially when you are young: in your teens, twenties, or thirties, picturing yourself as an elderly person in pain is awkward and difficult. This leads many people to delay taking care of their health, assuming they’ll deal with problems later. That’s a mistake.

The cliché “your body remembers” is true, but not literally. Untreated injuries force your body to adapt and compensate. For example, if your left knee hurts, your right leg carries more weight. Over time, this imbalance affects your hips, spine, neck, and shoulders. This process can take years, but eventually, you end up in pain that’s hard to treat. Doctors might not see the issue on X-rays or MRIs, and they can’t know it started with an untreated knee.

Neglecting injuries and pains throughout life allows them to accumulate and worsen. Aging inevitably adds wear and tear on joints, muscle loss, and reduced flexibility. This hits harder on a body already compromised by neglect. By the time you’re elderly, you risk constant pain and dependency on others.

You want to avoid that fate.

You want to live a full, high-quality life until you’re as old as dirt. While nobody can escape Father Time, you can push infirmity far forward. The best way to prepare is to keep your body strong and rehab injuries when they happen.

Simply put: if you don’t prioritize your health now, you’ll be forced to do so later.

2) The burned bridges principle

Here’s an additional concept to understand the lifespan process better: 

Imagine you tear a shoulder muscle by throwing a hard punch. You feel a stabbing pain when you raise your arm, so you go see a doctor. He recommends physical therapy, but you skip it because you figure it’ll heal naturally if you rest a bit.

You’re wrong.

The tear heals poorly by forming a bunch of scar tissue, which is not muscle tissue; that part of your muscle doesn’t function correctly anymore. No medical procedure can bring the original muscle tissue back.

You just burned your first bridge.

But you’re young, so you soldier on and after a while, it only hurts a little bit in certain movements. You continue for a few years thinking you’re fine as long as you avoid those.

You’re wrong again.

That hamstring never fully recovers and is now permanently weaker than the one in your other leg. This diminishes the range of motion in your hip and knee, creating an even bigger imbalance in your body: you develop a limp. It’s small at first, but it doesn’t go away anymore.

You just burned the next bridge.

Over the years, the limp gets worse, stresses your lower back and you develop a herniated disc. Your hamstring becomes stiff, irritating your sciatic nerve. Now you have radiating pain and numbness in your leg. Instead of seeing a doctor, you look up videos online on hamstring injuries and create your own rehab protocol. Because “you know your body” better than anybody else…

Because you are not a physical therapist, you make mistakes, go too hard, and tear the same hamstring once again.

And burn your third bridge.

This time, surgery is the only option. The doctor explains that even if successful, your hamstring will never be as strong as before the original injury. He insists on doing the rehab with full commitment.

The surgery goes well, but you find the rehab painful and tedious, so you only do half the sessions. Even so, you’re in less pain than before, and though your knee feels a bit unstable, you ignore it and keep training. A year later, you throw a spinning back kick, mess up the pivot on your support leg, and feel your knee shredding itself as the kick lands.

You just burned another bridge.

After emergency surgery, your doctor gives you the bad news: there’s nothing he can do. He repaired your knee as best he could, but the wear and tear over the years caused arthritis in your knee, hip, and lower back. That hamstring is now atrophied and can no longer stabilize your body as it should. You won’t kick hard with that leg ever again. For the rest of your life, you have to do daily rehab and injury prevention. When old age catches up with you, a wheelchair is most likely in your future.

Reading this, you might find this all a bit exaggerated.

It isn’t.

I’ve seen it happen multiple times with clients.

When you get injured, you have a limited amount of time to fix it. This is even more critical after surgery: you get one shot at rehab, and then your body stops trying to heal. Ignore the rehab, and you burn a bridge. The therapies and other medical interventions that could have helped you recover fully are then off the table. If you re-injure yourself, the next options are typically more invasive, higher risk, and offer worse odds at success.

This cycle of burning bridges, increasingly getting in worse shape, and having fewer options to fix the problems can go on for a while. But not indefinitely: eventually, there are no bridges left to burn and you’re out of solutions. All that’s left then is to manage the pain, discomfort, and loss of quality of life.

We all become old and frail; we have to accept that. But you don’t have to speed up the process and make the end worse than it needs to be…

3) The health spectrum

Many people think of being healthy as “not being sick,” but this isn’t a constructive approach for a long and healthy life. A better frame of reference is this:

• Imagine a line.

• In the middle, you’re “average” health—neither sick nor exceptionally fit. This is how most people see “being healthy.”
• To the left, things get worse: you feel unwell, get sick, become chronically ill, injured, and eventually die.
• To the right, you become increasingly healthy, fit, and resilient, reaching the level of the top 1% of the healthiest people in the world.

Most people aim to stay in the middle, thinking that’s good enough, but life happens.

You get tired, sick, injured, etc.

If you’re only in the middle of the line, any setback pushes you closer to the left, where being sick and fragile becomes your daily life. You can’t do the things you love; you have no energy, and others eventually have to care for you.

That’s not what you want….

You want to move towards the right as much as you possibly can. Each step to the right builds a buffer of health and resilience. When life throws something at you, you might slide back a bit, but you’re still in pretty good shape instead of in crisis.

It’s normal to move around on this line throughout your life. Some people are lucky to be blessed with a robust body that maintains good health without effort. If that’s you, everybody is jealous of you.

If you’re like me and others, you have to monitor and manage your health throughout your life. You have to work at keeping that buffer of health as big as possible. How much time and effort you dedicate to this is an individual choice: diminishing returns set in at a certain point, and everybody decides for themselves where the ideal point lies.

If after reading this you want to take action but don’t know where to start, I’ve got you covered: keep reading.

4) Four pillars of lifelong health

To build that buffer, focus on the four key areas below. You can read countless books on each one, so going in-depth is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, make each category a fundamental part of your life. Every day, for the rest of your life. Your focus will vary between them over time, but never neglect any for too long.

Here they are:

1. Sleep. Prioritize quality and quantity, aiming for seven to eight hours daily. Optimize your sleeping environment for darkness, temperature, and a good-quality bed. Sleep is essential for physical recovery and mental health; it isn’t optional.
2. Diet. What you eat determines how well your body functions and how healthy you are. It also influences the processes of both getting and avoiding illnesses. Focus on unprocessed foods, get plenty of fibre, vary your diet, drink plenty of water, and avoid systematic overeating. These five things go a long way in getting you started on the right track.
3. Exercise. “Rest rusts,” so never stop moving. Do what you can for as long as you can, but adapt your training when needed. Work around injuries and limitations instead of giving up. The best exercise is something you can stay motivated to keep on doing. That said, the best bang for the buck for health is a combination of strength training and mobility workouts. Especially as you get older, this keeps your musculoskeletal system in good working order. This has a huge overall health benefit and allows you to live freely instead of being unable to come and go as you please.
4. Social Interaction. This is probably the most neglected pillar of long-term health. We too often reduce health to only its physical components and neglect that we are also psychological and emotional beings. We have needs on that front as well, and they directly impact your physical body. Loneliness, depression, and the like will both shorten your life span and the quality of daily life. So, keep up your friendships, make time for family and loved ones, join a club, or even talk to strangers. It doesn’t have to be all the time or with hundreds of people, but enough to avoid feeling isolated from the rest of the world.

Your personal needs for these four pillars can vary wildly from others, which means you’ll have to experiment. As you get older and change, so will your needs. Don’t view the pillars as fixed; they are something that needs to evolve with you. Try things out, fine-tune them, and when they stop working, try something else. Life is change; embrace it.

Final Thoughts

It’s easy to chastise my client for his mistakes. But we all fall short of following good advice, even if we pay for it. Nobody’s perfect, especially me. I’ve shared the consequences of my mistakes after forty years of intense martial arts and self-defense training here and on my Facebook page. I work every day to rehab and prevent further injuries. I’m lucky that I can still do fairly intense training, but I’ve had to dial down on some things I love most. So, I don’t cast stones at my client, but share his story as a warning, knowing I could have suffered the same fate.

A crucial point:

Unless you’ve burned your last bridge, it’s never too late to start taking care of yourself. Maybe you won’t make the same progress as if you’d started earlier. But even in your 80s and 90s, you can still improve your physical condition and quality of life. Of course, starting early gets the best results. So, take the above into account and incorporate it into your daily life.

Your future self will thank you.

P.S.: For more “How-To” guides, go here: wimsblog.com/guides