I've never been a gym guy.
I trained a lot in endurance sports, and when I was a boy, I would train almost 30 hours a week, some weeks in basketball, but that was all running, a bit of jumping, no weights.
Done a lot of running, a lot of cycling, but as I say, not much strength.
In February of this year, they decided it was time to take all the advice from society about everything that I saw about old men losing muscle mass and needing to do some strength; I decided to try and formalise that.
The problem is I've got no idea what I'm doing, so I decided to seek out someone who did, and enter stage left, one of my great friends, Stuart Reekie, who now works with us.
It’s safe to say that Stuart is a ‘gym monster’.
He's a lifetime gym-goer, a massive guy, super, super strong and big, and he knows what to do at the gym.
Stuart agreed to kindly take me under ‘his wing’, and we trained together on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and when I'm not breaking my foot with a 25-kilogram weight disc because I don't know what I'm doing, I'm making some significant progress.
The fact is, though, that my gym age is less than 1 year old.
Stuart's gym age is over 30 years old.
I will never, ever reach the heights of the knowledge or the function of Stuart. He has a massive head start; it will be impossible for me to catch up.
No matter though, because when it comes to endurance sport, I have a head start on other people.
The massive amount of training I did in my teens for basketball changed the inside of my cells as well as my muscles and my metabolism, and so it means that if I decide to pick up endurance sport within 6 to 8 weeks, if I look after myself and train properly (and I understand how to train properly because I've done it a lot), I can be reasonably fit and ready to do some stuff.
If my leg worked, I think I could run a reasonable marathon in under 4 hours with probably 8 to 10 weeks of training.
That's because my ‘endurance age’ is about 40 or 45.
If you've never done endurance sport and decide to, on your 50th birthday, do a marathon, you will not be able to do it as well as I will, or with as little training as I would, and it's just a fact of history.
Funnily enough, (and I think you can see where this is going), the same applies to your job.
I was a young guy with limited experience who was probably too confident.
Now I see a lot of people who were like me.
The fact is this, though: most of the people that I come across have less of a dental age than I have.
I qualified at 22, and almost my entire career has been involved in surgery and implant surgery, so that would make it over 30 years of dental age.
If you've been practising for 3 years, it's not likely that you will have the experience or the wisdom that I have gained from the thousands and thousands of patients I've met and the procedures I've carried out.
The same applies to teaching.
I provided my first formal lecture to dentists in 1995; that's 31 years ago.
There is not a year that has gone past that I have not done a significant amount of speaking to dentists from that time.
It doesn't mean I'm good, but it means I've done a lot.
I have some skill in reading an audience and building a presentation and a story.
The conversation came up as we were away in Mallorca this week and I was chatting to Alex.
Alex was talking about his experience in different parts of dentistry and his experience in teaching when I explained to him that I will never ever be able to ride my bike as well as Alex does.
Alex's bike age is something like 45; my bike age is 18.
Even in those 18 years, he's done far more biking than I have.
Even if I started now and trained like a professional athlete, I would never ever catch up with Alex, and that's cool, isn't it?
Sometimes it's important to understand where we sit in the timeline.
It's not that people who are older or more experienced than you are necessarily better, but surely wisdom is worth something.
Depth comes with mistakes, comes with experience, comes with age.
Depth is as important as excitement and assurance.
Blog Post Number - 4674
Chicco is coming to Nottingham
This October, we’ll be welcoming Dr Chicco from Tanzania to The Campbell Clinic for his first visit to the UK.
To celebrate, we’ve launched Buy a Mile, asking our community to buy as many miles of his 4,745-mile journey as they can. Every £1 donated represents one mile, with every penny raised going directly to Bridge2Aid and its dental education work in Tanzania.
Buy a Mile and support Bridge2Aid here