Gareth Bale Quotes

I remember as a teen being able to eat more than my father. I was growing so fast and my body couldn't keep up.

My back is permanently messed up.

Between 12 and 14, I shot up a ridiculous amount. The muscles were struggling to stretch and grow at the rate my bones were growing. It gave me problems with my back and my hamstrings.

The ninth grade. I went from 5'9' to 6'8'.

When I was younger I was always big; I was a fat boy at school. I had an early growth spurt, and when I went to secondary school I was tall enough to be a policeman.

I grew six inches in a year.

People in this room must have back problems, I'm sure some of us do, and it is really, really one of the worst pains and debilitating parts of your body that you can actually have because you really can't do anything in your life when you have it.

I had a bad back for a couple of years. I had to do a lot of physiotherapy for it. What I couldn't understand at the time was why the therapists had me doing a lot of stomach work.

My back isn't great.

I was around 1.60 m or so, and then when I was 17 or 18 I started growing.

I was 5'3' when I was 15, but suddenly shot up to over 6 feet by the time I turned 18 and it was clear that an NBA career was up for grabs.

I was about 6-foot-3 my freshman year of high school, and after the summer, I was about 6-foot-8. It all happened so fast. I went into the summer being tall, and when I came back, I was a giant. My knees, man, they were throbbing all the time. I couldn't sit in the car for long stretches; my knees felt like they were going to explode.

It was Osgood-Schlatters. It wasn't good. It's a growing pains thing, and I had to have a lot of treatment on it. I just shot up immediately and didn't have any kind of physique to deal with it physically. I was tall, all arms and legs, and a bit gangly.

No, I had a back injury early on in my life.

Reaching the height of 6 ft. 5 in.; I never expected to be that tall. I just shot up.

Once a year my back will go out and it'll be... it's like a sciatic thing and it's the smallest thing. Like I could be leaning over the sink to brush my teeth in a weird way and it happens.

I did not have implants, I just had a growth spurt.

I've always been a late bloomer. My body developed late. From ninth to 10th grade, I grew like 3 inches. Just kind of stretched out. I was like 6-1, grew to 6-4 in 10th grade.

In my case, I was placing extreme pressure on my lower spine from rotating my hips too much. This is a common cause of bad backs - and bad shots - for golfers of all levels. In addition to resting, I worked with my trainer, Joey Diovisalvi, on strengthening the weaker lower-body muscles that contributed to my overactive hips and back pain.

Then I got a bad back injury, and they thought I wasn't going to have any feeling in my legs.

I did play two years of high school football and was very short and uncoordinated but the second year I was very tall and skinny and very uncoordinated.

I have a bad back partially from playing the drums and singing. I used to have to hold my body in such a position that my spine got out of alignment.

I grew really fast. It's true I went from 5'6" to 6'1" in six months in 8th grade. By the end of 8th grade, I was 6'1". Everyone was freaking out.

My most string-beanish, I guess, is when I was 15 years old. From 15 to 16, I went from 155 pounds to 215. By the time I graduated from high school, I was between 235-250.

My spine healed incorrectly. There were long periods when I'd be perfectly all right, and then there were many other times when I wasn't, when my back would give out and throw me down to the floor amid waves of nauseating pain.