From injuries to Ironman

He started life with a funny running style. He was told he had a disability that could put him in a wheelchair as an adult. He powered through years of injuries with the hopes of being a rugby star. He became so injured he lost the ability to run. He didn’t give up. He challenged every impossible moment. He remade himself. He is an Ironman.  

At four years old, Luke Taylor was a keen rugby player, but sideline supporters kept asking his parents why he was running funny. They decided to take him to a podiatrist, but found it was nothing to do with his feet. 

From there he visited several specialists over a year until finally one of the health professionals discovered this plucky Hamilton lad had a flexibility disorder.

This doesn’t mean Luke isn’t flexible. Ligamentous laxity, or ligament laxity, is what Luke is effected by. People usually think this means he’s not flexible simply because he can’t do classic flexible moves like touch his toes. However, what it means is the ligaments in his joints are very mobile because they’re loose, but his muscles are very tight. Basically, his joints are super flexible, but the rest of him isn’t. 

Luke, now aged 26, was told he had to stretch every day for at least 30 minutes and continue to be active while he was growing or he could end up needing a wheelchair and invasive surgery as an adult.

“I always thought it was a bit unfair that I had to do more than everyone else. For rugby I’d be doing an hour of stretches before going to the game to join everyone else for their warm up. In hindsight it was probably one of the most powerful things I could’ve done because it taught me how to work for something and put strategies in place and implement them.”

From a young age, Luke was in and out of physiotherapists and osteopaths. This influenced him to study sports science with the intention to become one or the other through postgrad study. 

But, by time he got to study sports science he had to have three years off running after a rugby season full of injuries. 

“That had a huge impact on me as running is my solace. At this time, I found there were just no answers for me in traditional medicine. No specialist could help me and I was just broken.

“It wasn’t until I took it upon myself to start looking a little bit deeper and find some answers. I began by identifying I was extremely fatigued and I had poor gut health.”

Luke said it wasn’t until he started looking from the angle of having a good diet that he noticed an improvement. He trialed a few different things and found that cutting out gluten and dairy worked best for him. 

“I was then able to recover. My body had been chronically inflamed and couldn’t fix itself. It was in a state of stress, so once I reduced that stress it started to respond, and I was able to fix it. 

“My diet was all gluten and dairy so it was a complete diet change that was hard. But as I do with everything, I just went all in and committed. My goal was to trial it for three months and see how it went. I wanted to give my gut a chance to reset and recover. Then I was going to reintroduce it, but I was feeling so good and I just didn’t want to go back to it.”

It was after this trial that his desire to become an osteo or a physio started to shift.

“I was working at a number of gyms, as well as trying to start my own, but the business model that I have today was established in this period of fixing myself.

“I identified so many similarities amongst my clients and how the general system was just letting these problems fall through the cracks. I saw heaps of flaws in the system and thought there had to be a better way and wondered why nobody was addressing it.”

Diving deeper into literature around the things that had impacted him, Luke gained more knowledge and then he started developing his ‘Taylored’ model of training.

“It’s a systematic way of breaking things down to help identify if any of my clients have any underlying issues in their performance. They may not be the same as mine, but it’s looking at a deeper level to see what is going on. 

“Gradually I’ve been critiquing and improving that process for the past three to four years. I’ve had some amazing results, there is nothing more inspiring than helping people to perform at their best. 

“It’s about untapping someone’s true potential and seeing them do things they don’t know they can do. There is nothing more liberating than seeing someone who has always been restricted by pain and being the one to remove that barrier.”

His business, Taylored Health and Performance, is now thriving. Luke said he likes that he can give people the education to fix themselves. 

“They don’t always have to rely on a practitioner to treat them.”