After eight years playing American Football and a lifetime of competing in sport, Tendai Trafford found himself battered and bruised by the age of 27.
“I was collecting injuries along the way,” he recalls. “By the time my first child came around, aged 26 or 27 I felt like someone had hit me with a cricket bat getting up first thing in the morning.”
His physical struggles culminated in a slipped disk whilst deadlifting in the gym, leaving him needing a trip to A&E and being sent on his way with painkillers and a wait for an NHS physio.
“It was almost like someone punched me in the face,” he says. “It was like 90% of the power in my legs had completely gone, and I had to crawl out of the gym in absolute pain.
“I was expecting some glorious things to come from the physio, mind-blowing things, but it was just a few movements, nothing happened, no pain relief whatsoever.
“I was in this limbo where I couldn’t work, I was in pain, couldn’t walk or do many things because I was dosed up on painkillers.”
Eventually, his personal trainer gave him his first form of muscle-assisted massage, later followed by kinetic therapy.
“It hurt but it got things moving,” he recalls. It also proved a life-changing moment for both his physical condition and professional life.
“It just got my body moving and a few treatments later it had improved me completely until I felt like an 18-year-old again. It felt like Dragonball-Z, that time chamber, just going back in time.
“That’s when I had a lightbulb moment that I wanted to take it up. I knew a lot of injured people, what I was doing wasn’t fulfilling me, so I got into it, trained, learned and then got started.”
Over the last three years, Trafford has become a "last chance saloon" for athletes - both active and retired - looking to alleviate long-term pain. Many have tried traditional methods and are still looking for solutions, or simply want a quick-fix to continue performing at the highest level.
“Athletes don’t want to spend eight months getting their back pain addressed,” he explains. “They want it as quick as possible to get back up and running and back to training.
“It’s not just the injury, it’s the psychological side of things where some lads are in such bad shape, dealing with pain day in, day out that they just want to address. Over time, the treatment can help that as well.”
Trafford’s kinetic therapy treatments involve establishing where the root cause of pain is, then using tools to massage the soft tissue and let blood flow into the scar tissue, ultimately aiming to break up and release the troublesome scar tissue.
His clients have covers a fast range of sports, whether Liverpool, Everton and Celtic academy footballers or former England women’s international’s battling with the effects of overuse of certain muscles. Other clients, such as professional MMA fighters, rugby players or American Footballers are fighting with impact injuries but striving for similar results.
“I started off with your regular clients, but it’s progressed over the last three years to working with athletes,” he says. “Professional footballers, rugby players, bodybuilders, ballerinas - you name it, I’ve treated them.
“That ranges from your professional athletes, getting them back up and running to you more complex, long-term health conditions. Sometimes there’s no set cure, but because it’s inflammation based, I can help them improve and hopefully get you moving again.
“A lot of the time, it’s become a theme where I’m kind of known as the last-chance saloon. A lot of my clients have been to chiropractors, osteopaths, you name it, they’ve tried it and ultimately they haven’t got a long-term fix.
“There’s a difference between what I can do, and yes it’s a bit uncomfortable, compared to the traditional sports medicine methods which take a long time to get you back up and running, or sometimes don’t manage it at all, which is why people come to me.”
