It’s the connections, not just the cells, that make you who you are.
Neurons (brain cells) form intricate networks that store information, shape skills, and define your unique personality. These connections are built through your life experiences, and once lost, they can’t be recreated exactly the same way.

Brain connections are fragile and hard to replace so protect them.
Unlike most body cells, neurons are rarely replaced. Damage to them or their connections can lead to permanent loss of abilities, memories, or personality traits. This is why brain injuries can have life-long consequences, even if the cells themselves survive.

The teenage brain is powerful, adaptable and still under construction.
During adolescence, the brain is “pruning” unnecessary connections and strengthening the most useful ones. This is a once-in-a-lifetime window to refine skills, improve abilities, and set up the foundations for adult life.

Flexibility comes with vulnerability so protect it.
While the teenage brain can adapt quickly, repeated disruptions like injuries, poor habits, or unhealthy environments can cause long-term effects that are hard to reverse. Minimising needless knocks and stresses gives it the best chance to reach its full potential.

Pain and fatigue are the signal for growth.
Exercise pushes your body beyond its current limits, causing temporary pain and fatigue. This tells your body to adapt, making muscles, bones, and systems stronger and more efficient over time. Without this challenge, nothing changes.

Everyone, even professionals, must train at their limits to improve.
From school athletes to Premier League players, progress comes from pushing performance week after week. There’s an upper limit to human ability, but most people never reach it, consistent, challenging training is the key to getting stronger and fitter.

What makes up your cardiovascular system and how a strong cardiovascular system keeps your body running at its best.
Exercise strengthens your heart and blood vessels, helping them deliver oxygen and nutrients more efficiently to every part of your body. This boosts endurance, performance, and overall health.

Regular activity helps manage fat and sugar for long-term health.
Your body uses sugar for quick energy and fat as a backup fuel source. Without enough movement, excess energy from food is stored as fat, which can build up over time. Staying active keeps these energy systems balanced.

A healthy cardiovascular system fuels better brain function.
Exercise strengthens the heart, improves blood flow, and removes blockages, helping deliver oxygen and glucose, the brain’s preferred fuel, more efficiently. This supports focus, learning, memory, and overall brain performance.

Physical training builds brain connections that improve skills.
Repeatedly challenging your body teaches the brain to control it more effectively, creating stronger and faster neural connections. Over time, this not only improves physical ability but also sharpens coordination, reaction time, and mental agility.

Sport sharpens focus, speed of thought, and decision-making.
Playing sport trains the brain to track moving objects, process complex information quickly, and make split-second decisions — skills that transfer to many areas of life beyond the game.

Sport strengthens working memory, a key driver of intelligence.
The constant need to analyse, predict, and respond in sport exercises the brain’s “processor,” improving its ability to juggle multiple pieces of information at speed. This can boost both sporting performance and general cognitive ability.

Sport builds teamwork and communication skills through shared goals and collaboration.
Whether in team sports or solo disciplines with coaches and support staff, sport forces you to coordinate, adapt, and communicate effectively, even with people you don’t always get along with, building valuable life skills for work, relationships, and mental health.

Sport strengthens social bonds and confidence through shared experiences.
Training, competing, and celebrating together create trust, respect, and long-term friendships, sometimes even with rivals, which boosts self-worth, reduces social anxiety, and supports overall wellbeing.

The human brain is powerful but physically vulnerable.
Its size and complexity make it more easily damaged by knocks or impacts to the head, especially in sports, despite being protected by the skull.

Brains are adaptable and can recover, but repeated damage is dangerous.
The brain can rewire, repair, and work around injury, particularly when young, but frequent impacts increase the risk of harm that can’t be undone.

Sport increases the risk of head impacts, even in non-contact games, because of speed, collisions, and fast-moving objects.
Modern sports balls can hit as hard (or harder) than older ones due to higher speeds, and even “light” balls can cause concussions if struck fast enough.

Brain injuries are often ignored because the brain doesn’t feel pain and can compensate for damage.
Unlike a broken bone, which stops you instantly, brain damage may not be obvious in the moment, so players often continue playing, increasing the risk of long-term harm.

Even small, symptom-free brain disruptions can harm performance and increase injury risk.
A subconcussion might only reduce balance, focus, or coordination by a few percent, but in sport, that small drop can mean missed catches, falls, and further head impacts.

Returning to sport too soon slows recovery and raises the chance of permanent damage.
The brain needs weeks to fully repair after injury, just like any other body part. Playing before it’s healed is like using broken equipment, it worsens the damage and lowers your game.

If in doubt, sit them out, every time.
Any significant knock to the head (or whiplash) should mean immediately stopping play, even without symptoms. Continuing risks worsening injury and long-term brain damage.

Recovery is a gradual, medically cleared process.
Rest for the first 24 – 48 hours with minimal physical and screen activity, then follow a slow, staged return to sport. No full training for at least 2 weeks, and no competitive play for at least 3, only after a healthcare professional gives the all-clear.