From a schoolboy sprinter to the Olympic team.

At 12 years old, James had a plan: represent Great Britain at the Olympics. He was the fastest boy in his school, and his PE teacher had told him he had a future in running. Linford Christie was his idol. Running was the one place his stammer could not follow him.

Running was my joy, my first love, and my passion. I found a freedom in it I had never experienced in a classroom.

BODY, chapter one

The injury that ended one plan

At 16, waiting his turn on a cold autumn morning, he came out of the blocks for an assessment and went down ten strides in. A cramping sensation above the knee, then an electrical one. He tried to run it off, because that had always worked before, and was told to apply heat, which he now knows was the worst possible advice.

Nobody diagnosed it. He was sent straight for treatment: an aggressive massage therapist who made it worse, then physiotherapists who told him to exercise the muscle, which damaged it further. An MRI eventually showed a muscle tear that had calcified, a condition called myositis ossificans. He chose surgery and lost a large part of the muscle, with none of the aftercare he needed.

He kept turning up injured, and started losing races to people he used to beat. At 17 he gave up the dream, with what he calls a dodgy leg and no idea who he was any more.

I had learnt that talent can only get you so far. To really succeed you need the right training methods, coaches, and therapists supporting you.

BODY, chapter one

A new plan

If he could not run at the Olympics, he could help other athletes get there, and make sure nobody else went through what he had. He looked at medicine, physiotherapy and osteopathy, and chose osteopathy for its four years of anatomy and its refusal to treat one part of the body in isolation.

He qualified and went straight to work, fourteen hour days, treating everyone from women in their third trimester to ninety year olds, and young athletes at the point of turning professional. At the time it was almost unheard of for an osteopath to work in sport. He pushed anyway, starting with junior Great Britain athletes and moving on to the senior squad.

Rio, 2016

British Athletics invited him in, on one condition: close the practice for four years for the chance of being picked. He took the risk. The call came, and he went to the Rio Olympics as a therapist for the Great Britain team, treating the athletes he used to race against at 16.

One of the highlights of his career came in Cape Town, when Linford Christie walked into the treatment room they would share for six weeks.

I suddenly turned back into that 7-year-old boy, who had realized for the first time that anything was possible.

BODY, chapter one

Why Rising Health exists

On the flight home from Rio, with two young children at home and his father recently gone, a civil engineer who had worked without balance and paid for it, James decided to stop chasing the international circuit and build something in the UK instead.

Word spread. Premiership footballers, film and television clients, touring artists, and people who will never be household names, including the fireman with lower back pain whose prostate cancer was caught early because somebody looked properly. Over the years he has treated David Beckham, Kylie Minogue and Eamon Holmes among many others.

The problem was arithmetic. One person, two hands, ten patients a day before quality starts to drop. Rising Health is the answer to that: a team of senior osteopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, acupuncturists, personal trainers and performance coaches, briefed personally by James, so the same standard travels to a set, a stadium, a tour bus or an office.

The books are the other half of the answer. BODY, published by HarperCollins, is an A to Z guide to taking care of your body. Back in Ten, published by Orion Books, is the ten minute method for backs. Both exist so people can get proper answers without waiting for an appointment.

My ethos has always been, anything is possible. That is my baseline.

James Davies

The stammer he was told to work around

James has had a stammer since childhood. At school it meant the familiar choking sensation whenever he was asked to read aloud, and a page of text that seemed to take a lifetime. When he was choosing a career he ruled out anything that meant talking all day, because he assumed the stammer had made that decision for him.

He fixed it the way he now fixes everything else: in small pieces that fit inside a normal day. There were no free hours for weekly therapy, so he practised breathing techniques while he got dressed in the morning, every morning, for years. Over the last decade the stammer has gone from what speech therapists call an overt stammer to a covert one. It has not gone away, and on a tired or stressful day it still catches him. He controls it rather than being controlled by it.

I’ve turned what I thought was my weakness into a strength.

BODY, chapter one

From avoiding the register to the keynote stage

The boy who dreaded reading a paragraph out loud now does it for a living. James speaks on television and radio, on stage at conferences and corporate away days, on podcasts, and at festivals and live events. He has written two books and talks about them in public, on camera and unscripted.

It is the clearest example of the thing he says to clients who have been told their problem is permanent. Nobody handed him fluency. He built a method, did it daily, and kept doing it long after anyone was watching.

It also shapes how he speaks to a room. Because words were hard for so long, he does not waste them, and he has no interest in jargon. People remember what he says and act on it, which is exactly what you want from a talk you have paid for.

Anything is possible with the right methods in place.

James Davies