In this talk, Keegan Smith reflects on a lifelong relationship with injuries, beginning with early physiotherapy and continuing through adulthood. He argues that injuries can be a source of growth if approached with the right mindset: accepting imperfection, avoiding the urge to push through pain, and leveraging the body's innate healing mechanisms. Smith highlights how children naturally develop athletic ability through playful, instinctive movement without formal coaching, suggesting adults can tap into similar instincts. He advises listening to bodily signals, adapting activities to current capabilities, and maintaining a positive, forward‑moving attitude. The talk also challenges the notion that coaches must have a perfect body, emphasizing that one can still teach and progress despite physical limitations.
Chapters
We're going to talk about the best thing, injuries. Times when parts of your body are bothering you and either stop you from doing the thing that you would like to do, or they don't let you do it in the way that you would like to do it. I've had some degree of injury since I was 10 years old. Maybe earlier. I went to physiotherapy to learn to walk as a two year old because I wasn't walking properly. There's always been something wrong and honestly, I don't mind that. I kind of enjoy that there's a challenge in some area of the body. It's always going to be there if you're pushing consistently to improve yourself. So letting go of the idea that everything's going to be perfect all the time can be a freeing one. At the same time, we want to balance the opposite idea of not deliberately hurting ourselves and overcoming things that are bothering us. So there's great tools here to help you overcome areas that are bothering you. We'll talk about that in more detail. Of like, what helps the body to naturally heal itself. The body is always naturally attempting to heal itself and the mind has a big part in that. The level of stress, level of arousal, hormones, all of these things. But you can also heal injuries by being more playful and just instinctively moving more and moving through life. Sounds like a funny idea too, because we're used to getting special exercises and I love special exercise, and you're going to get them within this program. But children are able to naturally avoid injury and progress themselves from 0 to 7 years old. They get miraculous improvement in athletic ability without usually being coached. Especially those first two or three years. There's no coaching. They're not taking on feedback from anyone. Even blind children who can't see their parents and those around them follow the same movement patterns and they develop. So it's not just the fact that they're mimicking. There will be some mimicry of what's going on if they have eyes and vision. But a lot of what unfolds within us in our athletic development is very natural. And we naturally know how to push somewhere near the limits to be able to improve, but not so hard that we cause issues and injuries. I would encourage you to reconnect with that feeling. Don't injure yourself. If you know that something's right near the limit and you sense like, if I keep doing this, it's not going to end well, don't keep doing it. If you need to have that journey and you want to have the experience of whatever comes from doing too much and doing it the wrong way and pushing through something. Okay. It's not for me to decide what your experience is going to be, but I would invite you into the idea of not injuring yourself and not pushing through pain. And beyond things, there's always something that you can do. So if there's an area of the body that's not perfect, then, like my big toe right now, I kicked it playing soccer. I kind of dug it into the floor two days ago. It's not perfect. Doesn't impede my juggling at all. Doesn't impede my bench press or my standing press or my chin ups. So there's lots of things that I can do. And embracing the things that I can do helps me to keep feeling good, moving forward, and giving my toe that time to improve itself. Could I also put my toe in some hot water, move it around a bit, do different things to support it 100%. And we're going to go through those things, but know that we have an instinctive ability to avoid injury. And if there is an issue in the body, staying positive, continuing to move forward with life with the abilities that we do have is a great thing. Often I hear coaches say, like, I just need to, you know, I need to fix this thing myself before I can go and help others. Sore knee or something. I was like, well, if we cut off your leg, would you still want to coach? Like, yeah. I was like, all right, well, let's just cut off the legs so we can start coaching. You don't have to have the perfect body, the perfect everything to move forward, move forward with your life, move forward with your abilities, address the thing, don't cut off the leg, move, move forward. And the process itself continues to be enjoyable. So I would challenge you and support you to embrace whatever challenges come along with injuries and continue to move into the ability that you want to move towards.
