Some advice is shit – so it pays to be your own best coach.

Dion Nash - Be your own best coach

An old cricket coach told me this when I was 16 years old and I’ve never forgotten it - 'Some advice is shit – so it pays to be your own best coach'.  Basically what he was saying was learn your own game, understand it and be able to judge what advice is good advice and useful to you and what advice is not. Because if you listen to people blindly not knowing what their advice means to you, it will end in tears. This simple edict has served me well over the years not only in cricket but in life in general. I’m sharing it now because we are fast approaching summer in the southern hemisphere and very soon we will be basking in endless UV and hot sand. This means lots of the goodness of vitamin D, but also the imminent dangers from the sun we have all heard time and time again.

Growing up there was a great campaign called slip, slop, slap - it was a huge success and the message really did get through. Yet still skin cancer rates in the southern hemisphere are some of the highest in the world (up to four times higher than Canada, UK and USA (1)) and that hole in the ozone layer is going nowhere. So now is no time to get slack, our advice to you is to be your own best coach.

Studies increasingly show that Vitamin d and some sun exposure is good for us (2). To our mind this is common sense. But the trick is understanding how much and where the line is between good sun and bad sun, enough sun and too much sun. This will vary greatly from person to person, depending on skin type, time of day that you are exposed, what you are wearing and yes what sunscreen you have on.

This just underlines the need to understand your own skin, to learn to read it, listen to it and ultimately get along with it. There is no point wishing you had someone else’s skin type, in fact this can lead to dangerous behavior, longing to have your friends great tan, hanging in there for that extra bit of sun against your better judgement, many of us have been there. Instead we must learn how our skin reacts to sun, what it can handle and know when to get inside and take shade. Learn what chemicals are in the sunscreens you use. Learn the difference between a physical sunscreen and a chemical one. Learn what natural defenses your body/skin has and learn how to assist them, not fight them. Only when we understand something can we take steps to remedy it or in this case protect it – so our challenge to you this summer is to ‘learn your own skin’ enjoy the sun but through knowledge and understanding be safe in the sun.

 

As a cosmetics company we pride ourselves on our SPF 50 sunscreen No Dice, we take all of matters to do with skin and sun seriously and we are here to help. If you have any questions at all, please email info@triumphanddisaster.com and we will try to answer your query and if we don’t know we will do our best to point you to someone who does, but like that old cricket coach said, we implore you to be your own best coach, it might just save a life.

 

Credits;

1 - http://sciencelearn.org.nz/Contexts/You-Me-and-UV/Looking-Closer/NZ-skin-cancer-statistics

2 - https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/vitamin-d/

 

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