Sam Mostowfi
Elite Gymnast
One of the most important things in elite level sport is having the determination, focus and drive to be the best even when sometimes things get in your way such as injury, a bad competition or just life! You have to the mental ability and humility to pick yourself up and carry on and do what is necessary to reach your goals. Having the right people around you and motivating yourself when others can’t;are all qualities of a top tier athlete.
Being a gymnast myself,I have had to learn these skills from a young age. This has been crucial for me getting to where I am today. Facing many obstacles, injury’s, pressure of working through the GBR system were only a few of the obstacles to face. Unlike most sports, Gymnastics is highly demanding, increasingly time consuming and requires a lot of sacrifice and stress on the body. Missing out on family events, school life, education, and friends’birthdays to train and compete. However, the life lessons and experiences I have had from my sport are incomparable. Having the ability to do what I love doing for a living, travelling the world visiting amazing places and people; I wouldn’t change it for the world.Being able to do skills only a handful of people can do and competing globally on the big stage for my county are only a few reasons I love my sport.
My family saw my passion for gymnastics and saw this as an opportunity too great to miss and helped me each step of the way, whether it was driving me backwards and forwards to training daily, taking me to the best training facilities or moving to Kent to allow me to get the best coaching…
This is where I was first introduced to Deborah and her team at Restoring health almost 9 years ago. I moved club to a facility called Pegasus Gymnastics Club. I believed it would give me the best chance of success. Here is where I first started getting treatment after training once a week. During my teenage years, like most boys I had a lot of growing pain and small injury’s which were preventing me from training at 100%. Most people don’t understand that the best way to protect an athlete is to prehab, not rehab. I’ve learnt over the years by doing the right things (eating well, sleeping well, training well) is a much more efficient way to protect and strengthen the body before injuries occur rather than having to deal with them once the damage is done. I am very fortunate that my mother is a Nutritionist and dad is a restaurateur, meaning diet has always been very important to me.
Furthermore, making sure my body is relaxed and recovered was just as important. This is where Deborah and I worked closely together after training on a Saturday to prevent muscle damage and risk of injury by working on areas we felt were fatigued and needed treatment. As well as this, I have had the pleasure of using the Hugo Pro high intensity PEMF device. This device has enhanced my training with its effective pain treatment, muscle tone influence, blood circulation and cell regeneration. Without this kind of unique treatment after training, I wouldn’t be able keep the same leave of intensity on a day-to-day basis. All having a very positive effect on my gymnastics and development.
My goal looking forward to the future is to reach the highest level possible for a gymnast, which is the Olympic Games, and I am excited to see what the future holds for me. In the next couple weeks, I am training towards World Championship trials and Bundlesga in Germany where I will be competing for a German team in the German league against some of the best gymnasts in the world. I also have commitments to Team GB where I attend training camps and competitions as an when they need me.
