Jim's End of Year Reflections

Talking about the past year and the year to come.

As the year comes to a close I always feel I need to look back, to see where we have been. This gives us an opportunity to reflect and make changes in our own lives for our future.

There is so much in life beyond our control, possibly our wants and needs dictate and distract from what is really important to us just being.

Our past year

I guess it’s been a year of transition in many ways, Nicky has continued to grow her nutritional based healthcare, including using her new practice of taking blood for a in depth assessment of how she can help people. Ella has started her final year of her law degree and planning her masters in 2026.

For me it has been a little different, I had another trip to Vienna for a course, as well as a trip north to Otley, which I’d not done in a few years. However, my biggest challenge is a return to some structured training, rather than just doing stuff!

So, for Christmas Ella asked for an entry into the Chester marathon, which is wonderful that my daughter has found a love of running. Though she also, as part of the present, wants me to run with her 🙈 And so I need to train again!!

My Feldenkrais practice

I found Feldenkrais not in order to add another modality to my working practice, I found it to help myself. It did such a good job of helping me learn to understand my own movement issues, that I had to go further and becoming a practitioner has helped me to learn the fullness of understanding of why it is possible to help everyone, athletes included, to benefit from this process. It is because of this that I am back training, running, cycling and in the spring/summer swimming in a lake, with the intention of participating in events again!

We all age, it’s still better than the alternative!

So the next marathon I will run with Ella will be my twentieth,  I will be 65 years old. When I was running in my late twenties/early thirties, I believed by the age of forty I would have to stop running and return to my first love, racing my bike. There was no way then I would have contemplating running, let alone a marathon!

I’m not going to win anything, I’m just happy to be running and intend to do it as long as I can, and it is because of my regular Feldenkrais practice that I am able to do it.

A brief introduction to the Feldenkrais.

Functional Integration

What Functional integration can do for you ?

I am now using aspects of this in nearly every treatment I do, it has changed the way I look at things on different levels of functional mobility and movement. We all have different ways of moving, very few people are capable of moving without some kind of functional disfunction, mainly because of brain side (left,right hemisphere) dominant functions.

Awareness Through Movement (ATM class)

What Awareness through movement can do for you.

Where Functional integration is for the individual, ATM is a class based learning.

There are many ways to move, often when you ask a class of 5, 10 people to move their leg, they can all find a different way to do it! And they can all be right, however they can all be unaware of the other options, which may offer different opportunities to find easier ways, which for athletes could be beneficial in terms of speed and efficiency of movement, which can aid improvement in their times and endurance.

Nutrition

Nicky’s nutrition and blood testing experiences has continued to improve and change our thinking and thoughts on eating and supplementation.

We have always been interested in what we eat, how and what we cook with, as well as more importantly why we are eating it!

As with physical therapy, the more people you see, the more you understand how individual everyone’s experiences is. This is even more apparent when you see what people consume in their daily routine and the reasoning for their habits around food in general.

How can Nicky help you achieve your new year goals for a fitter, healthier lifestyle, with a detailed look at what is going on within?

As an extension of her nutrition advice, she has added phlebotomy (detailed blood testing), to offer as detailed information and advice on the benefits of eating healthy foods that are essential for the health of your individual needs!

And of course how our decades of experience of understanding injuries and life challenges can help you in our treatment room 🙏🏻

Conclusion

There is no such thing as mind, body, soul! There is just you and your habits of eating, sleeping, movement and hopefully some thinking?

I guess this is what we look at in ourselves, and as we age it is more important to focus on our personal habits to maintain our quality of life, to sustain ourselves in order to use our time to fulfilment, in both athletic and mental health 🙏🏻