An Ounce Of Prevention Is Worth A Pound Of Cure

This is in some ways a follow-up blog to my why Wednesday video.  What does the phrase “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” mean?  It means that doing things to prevent a problem or issue in small parts preventatively is a lot easier than trying to make major changes after an issue has arisen.  As an example think of a credit card, an ounce of prevention would be things like using your credit card sparingly and paying it off monthly, or at least in a timely fashion.  Which is much much easier, and more manageable, than continually charging things you aren’t able to afford at the moment to a credit card and then trying to pay off high amounts of credit card debt.  For anyone that has experienced this you know how unbelievably difficult it can be.  

The same is true of the body, very simply the best way to stay active and moving, is to….you guessed it, stay active and moving, training, ect.  It's a lot easier to maintain an active lifestyle for 10 years, than it is letting yourself become sedentary for ten years and try to rewind the clock.  Realistically you could probably maintain a relative level of fitness and mobility with just being physically active for 15-20 minutes a day in a pinch.  That seems a lot less daunting than being 10 years older and trying to train 6 days a week to make up for lost time.  

With all that being said I fully realize that this is a hard thing to picture, this is maybe our most difficult thing as coaches to convey because people tend to have trouble understanding something they have yet to experience.  Myself included, it’s very hard to consider back pain prevention (most often hip mobility) as a priority, until you hurt your back. Pressing overhead doesn’t seem like a big deal right now, until you have to do months of PT and waiting for your frozen shoulder symptoms to go away.  This is just something you have to trust me/us on. Keep yourself healthy now, to be able to hold up when things get challenging down the road, the reverse is EXPONENTIALLY harder.