Jake Tapper Quotes

I've always known that sporting people frequently suffer from joint problems because of the repeated strain they put on their bodies to get to the top. But somehow I never thought it would happen to me.

For a lot of players, it's not that they don't want to play anymore or that they get tired of it or bored of it. It's that their bodies give out.

I don't always choose to stay fit by playing tennis, because that comes with its own wear-and-tear.

During a packed season, maintaining fitness becomes tough because you can't put too much effort into it. You're constantly monitoring workloads.

Every action has a consequence. It may be good for strengthening. And I have no doubt that lifting a lot of weights can get you stronger. I just don't know if lifting stronger weights can keep you healthy, or it can keep you doing your job better, especially for a pro athlete.

But I do hope that medicine continues to improve and, in 10 years maybe, they'll be able to fix my body better than they did for the poor guys who are crippled up from playing in the NFL in the '60s and the '70s.

Dancing is hard on all bodies, but I particularly kept getting injured.

Truth is, none of us professional athletes are ever 100 percent healthy. We just decide what we're going to tape up and push through without making it worse.

You just have to look at my nose to see what kind of lifestyle I led... sports and fisticuffs.

Never in my heart did I want to quit, but I did, at the end of 2012, start to wonder when I was getting fractures from running hardly at all; I started thinking, 'Am I asking too much of my body? Is it not going to do this for me anymore?'

You go to the gym to make sure you have the stamina to breathe in the corsets.

I am not going to box unfit, obviously.

If you see me when I first burst onto the scene, you see how quickly I could turn for a big lad and how fast I was up and down the pitch. Then I started picking and choosing my time to go forwards because I was scared of my hamstring going or my knee not dealing with it.

In any professional level competition, soccer players, you've got to know when to stop.

Look at rugby, the national sport, you have guys weighing 130kg, 140kg, who can run like sprinters full clip into each other causing brain damage constantly on that field.

I find it hard to believe that anyone could be playing regularly and saying they do not have a niggle. It is the nature of the beast, what you get when you play a lot of rugby: you have to get another niggle to forget about the one you already have.

It's so uncommon for athletes to push themselves the way they do and not have injuries as a result.

I've always had little problems in my ankles when I played very hard games, they'd get very inflamed and stiff.

The problem with these UFC fighters - and they're all fantastic athletes, top of the line in the entire world - is that they wear their bodies down in these training camps. All these guys that are cutting weight are just destroying their own bodies.

There's going to be wear and tear on your body; that's just the nature of the sport, no matter if you're a rookie or if you're 10 years deep in the league.

As a forward it is always a bit easier to avoid the kind of challenges that can cause impact injuries.

A lot of people will comment, 'All the high flying will catch up to you.' I think any form of wrestling will catch up to you.

It's impossible for one player to play the whole year. I've learnt that myself, and you're always bound to get injuries.

There were actually a couple of times I fell asleep at the gym on accident after a workout, but it was still late enough, so I went home and caught some sleep.

As athletes, we're always trained to play through stuff. And I've played through all types of injuries - ankle sprains, shoulder, whatever - and with the brain it's just different.