Pilates & Yoga in Sport: Performance, Recovery & Rehab Explained

As athletes, we’re training harder and competing more, yet injuries and burnout are increasing. In this episode, we’re unpacking the real value of Pilates and Yoga in sport, not just for flexibility, but as powerful tools for performance and rehabilitation. I’m joined by Marelee Fourie, physiotherapist, Pilates instructor, and founder of Marelee Fourie Physiotherapy in Johannesburg.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:37

To help many people from everyday movers to artists. We help them build strong resilient bodies with better movement quality and long-term injury prevention. Hi Merely. Uh welcome to Move and Thrive Podcast. Thank you so much for making time to be with me in this platform. How are you doing? How's family on your side?

SPEAKER_02 2:02

Hi, Doc. Thanks so much for inviting me to be here today. Yeah, family is busy. I've got a two-year-old and an almost nine-year-old, so the girls are definitely keeping me on my toes. But it it's a pleasure. And we are living in the good old days, like they say. So trying to enjoy it and just soak it all up.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Oh, nice, man. Good that family is going right. And business-wise, how is physiotherapy business going?

SPEAKER_02 2:27

Yeah, so business also, I think, you know, if you speak to business owners in general and not just in physio, I think um we are starting to see a bit of a change again from the economy side. Um patients are definitely trying to access physio. And in the beginning of the year, uh, you know, medical aids are still nice and full and patients have access, and we're also starting to lead up to bigger competitions for some of our athletes. So um we are definitely starting to see more and more patients, but p business is good and we can't complain, and it's a blessing. And um, yeah, yeah, taking a day by day.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Yeah, yes, busy is good for business people, there.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

It's nice to hear that. And I know you are running um Pilates and yoga classes. Some of my colleagues attend your classes, they're really enjoying it, and I always promise to join the class. Tell us about that class. How is it going?

SPEAKER_02 3:20

Sure. So we'll we I'm going to reserve a special spot for you to make sure that you get here. So yeah, I I got introduced um to Pilates before I even became a physiotherapist. And I've been running a Pilates studio for the last 15 years. So it was actually with a previous degree that I studied that I did um my Pilates training as well. And I just retrospectively, you know, looking back on the picture, I actually don't know how I would be a Pilates instructor without being a physio. And I actually don't know how I'd be a physio without being a Pilates instructor, because I think the two complements each other so nicely, and it really is for everybody. You know, Pilates doesn't have an age group or an injury profile or anything like that. It really accommodates for everybody. Um and I think it allows us the space and the opportunity to work on things that we potentially can't work on in other settings in the sense that we we can strengthen you without necessarily putting you through the same movement patterns or putting you in the same position and um training techniques that you use to strengthen your body. So we we get the benefit of strengthening, but we also we can potentially limit the risk of injuring you from overuse.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

That's good. That's good. I l I love how your work sits right at the interface or intersection of rehab, movement quality and performance, which is exactly what this conversation is about today. We I want you to educate my listeners about the value of Pilates yoga in sports. And maybe for somebody for an athlete who has never tried either of the two, how would you simplify it and explain what each one offers and why they matter in sports?

SPEAKER_02 5:03

Perfect, yeah, great question. So I think as an athlete who's never tried Pilates or yoga before, it's important to see that Pilates is strength training for how your body moves. It's not necessarily loading in a particular way and it's not necessarily focusing on building muscles. It's about building deep core stability, precise control and coordination. And so every movement in your sport is made more efficient by doing Pilates because it's about the movement but having control through that movement. And then yoga, on the other hand, is more about restoration, improving flexibility, mobility, and helping you recover because there's a lot more focus on being able to go into particular positions and being able to hold and sustain those positions, so you do need a lot of flexibility. So it's also to restore the mind and to assist you with calming your nervous system down. We will touch the nervous system a little bit with regards to Pilates because it definitely does that in Pilates as well. But um in sport, you know, I think yoga and Pilates addresses the gaps that traditional training often misses. Because the key thing for athletes is if you think about who does Pilates, it's not just runners or just the um guy on the street, it's rugby players, ballerinas, all of those people. And the and the beautiful thing about Pilates, like I said earlier, is we move you out of your repetitive patterns. When we train for a sports, so when you're a runner and you're training for a particular race, you're obviously going to run. And unfortunately with running, we we encounter um overuse injuries. So we need to limit the risk of those injuries, but we do need to strengthen you, and that's where Pilates gives you that complementary strengthening system. So you're not repeating the same pattern again and again. Um and it's really important that you don't wait until you've injured yourself. It's important to start building this into your training long before you get into that season's peak, so that we're not only using Pilates as a re-hab method, but we're actually using it as a strengthening method for our running or our sports that we um participate in.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

You talk a lot about Pilates, but what about yoga? What's the difference between the two?

SPEAKER_02 7:06

Sure. So um so from a breathing perspective, um Pilates, you will breathe in to prepare and you will exhale to do the movement. In yoga, it's the opposite way around. So generally, when you do the movement um components, the inhalation is there. From a muscle length positioning, so I know in some of your previous conversations that you've had, we've spoken about concentric and eccentric movement, but we also have something like isometric strength. So to simplify it for the listeners, concentric is where we shorten the muscles, eccentric is where we lengthen the muscles, and isometric is where we hold the muscles. So in Pilates, generally you have lengthening and shortening of the muscles, whereas in yoga you have a lot of sustained strength that you're building. So you go into a particular position or posture, and then you will sustain that posture, and you will work on your holding strength in that position. And like I said, you really do require quite a bit of um flexibility with regards to yoga because some of the positions do push your body into um quite interesting positions. And then you know, meditation is a big component of yoga as well. So there will be a focus on mindfulness in yoga that doesn't necessarily flow into Pilates. I don't think it's a national uh natural and treated way of looking at Pilates, but it will every Pilates instructor and every yoga instructor will bring their own flair to the class, and so things that are important to them will obviously come through in their classes. So both of them will get you to move, will get you to strengthen, will get you to stretch. But how you strengthen, how you stretch, where you breathe, you know, those things will be a little bit different. And so yoga is probably for the guy or the or the runner that is trying to really work on their flexibility and also work on their nervous system recovery, whereas Pilates is more about trying to isolate and correct the the muscle pattern imbalances and the muscle strength imbalances that you've got.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

That's such an important distinction. Why do you think runners or sports people are hesitant to try Pilates and yoga? I've got my reason now why I've not tried it. Maybe it's because of time. I do believe it works, but because I know some associate it with some spiritual issues and all of that.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

Yeah, so that's also uh it's a good question. So, you know, yoga in itself does have its um its feet founded in religion and in traditions and things like that. So it definitely can be that component. But I think there is the idea that Pilates in yoga is for the old Tani that sits on her strip and she just needs to do some exercise. I mean that when you look at somebody doing yoga in Pilates, it doesn't look very challenging. And there's also the aspect of the fact that it has to be it's generally done indoors, you know. Runners tend to like to be outdoors, they want to move, they want to have um the freedom to see different places. I think running is a very engaging activity that you're participating in, whereas Pilates can become a little bit boring in that sense. But I think it it it definitely isn't like that until you go and lie down on that mat, you won't know the value of what these two things can bring to you because when you look at it as an outsider perspective, it doesn't look challenging at all. It just looks like you're doing these tiny little movements, and what on earth could that do for my running? The other side of it is I think that there's always the misconception that Pilates is for women. Um you know, where it's only women that do these things. And the the background behind Pilates is that a male created Pilates and it was used on injured soldiers in German camps in the war. That's where it all started. And he then um had a wife that was a ballerina, and she took it to New York and she started using it on her ballerinas because the ballerinas had a lot of overuse injuries and they had no other way to train except do ballet. So that's the roots of Pilates. And so, you know, I always look at it and think if if we could get the core nice and strong, if you think about it from a skyscraper or like building a skyscrap scraper perspective, um, you can have the best equipment, you can do all of the training, but if the foundation is awful that skate that skyscraper, that skyscraper is never going to stand and it's always going to be unstable. And so that's what yoga and pilasis is going to offer you is a stable foundation. So that the running and all of the other training, whichever sports you participate in can in can be built on that foundation.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

I know many runners or athletes already they train hard, they do strength training, they run and do all of those things. And you mentioned that Pallatis can help you move better, perform more efficiently, or even stay injury free. Can you maybe talk a little bit more on that to say how exactly is Pallatis or Yoker will help me move better and perform efficiently and even stay injury free?

SPEAKER_02 12:01

Sure. So first and foremost, I think we must think about the uh you know what happens in our body. So obviously when we train for something, we cause a lot of stress and there's a lot of hormones that go with that. Um and we don't do a lot of purposeful relaxation to assist our bodies and our nervous systems to move from vital, flight, or stress times to more of a parasympathetic relaxation state. So the first component that both of these bring is breath. So there's a lot of breathing that happens um in both yoga and in Pilates. And the the idea also with these two is not that Pilates was or you know, even yoga. Pilates and yoga were it wasn't designed for somebody to do necessarily do on their on their own. The idea was that you had an instructor watching over you, correcting your movement buttons, correcting your proprioceptive input, helping you with your breathing so that you could breathe into your diaphragm and into your ribs and into your back so that you can move areas where you don't necessarily move yourself. And when you don't have a good regulated nervous system, you know, if we look at our smartwatches, it always looks at our heart rate variability. And all that does is it looks at the variation between our heart rates going up and down and whether we have good recovery. And that is also linked to our nervous system. So when we don't have a nervous system that responds well because we're always in fight or flight, because you go from your job into your running session, and then you jump into bed and you sleep, and tomorrow you do the same thing. So our bodies never go into that relaxed state where it can just prepare and rest. In deep sleep, that is where we rest and we recover and we fix our bodies. And if we don't do activities to help us to get into that restful state, we're obviously going to not have that rest and relaxation that we need and recovery that we need. Um, and also from a breath perspective, not to hammer on breath, but if you think about how athletes generally breathe, we breathe quite shallowly, chest dominant, neck heavy, often there's mouth breathing that goes with it as well, um, especially when you're running and you're under fatigue. And your core is part of your breath because your diaphragm is part of your breath. So there's a lot of research that shows with good diaphragmatic activation and good core movement that your endurance improves, you can have changes in chronic pain patterns and things like that. So we want to ensure that we have breath integrated with movement because naturally, as a runner, you're going to be breathing when you're running, but it's about how you breathe. You want to have better intra-abdominal pressure, you want your diaphragm to be part of the spine to stabilize the spine, you want to calm your nervous system, and you want to optimize your nasal breathing so that we can improve oxygen efficiency and you know get the oxygen to our muscles the way that we should. So the movement under load in the sense that we are moving our muscles in a different way compared to when we're running, we're strengthening in a different way, will help with recovery because we're not loading in the same way. But the breathing in the nervous system that comes with it is a massive component that is often underestimated from a training perspective. So we naturally breathe when we run, but we don't think about how we breathe. And so, in these two methods, in Pilates and yoga, there's a little bit more focus on breath to optimize that breathing so that it carries over into your running.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

Are there specific sports or athletes that will tend to benefit the most from Pilates?

SPEAKER_02 15:18

You I can't say that there's anybody that would not benefit from it. It literally goes across the board. It it is for everybody. It doesn't matter how old, young, what sport you do, there will always be in any sport, there will be imbalance because there's repetition. And so if we can restore that imbalance, you will benefit from it.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

You talked about recovery. Athletes often talk of tightness, fatigue, feeling exhausted. Is Pilates or yoga able to help you recover and manage training stress?

SPEAKER_02 15:50

Absolutely. You know, I'm not gonna go back to all of the breath that we spoke about, but there is that that component of it. Um it's also because you are loading the muscles, you moving the muscles, you going through progression, because Pilates will work and yoga will work on exactly the same principles as strength training. You will gradually increase the load, you will increase the stamina, you will work on your endurance. So it has the same principles, and we will ensure that the load is evenly spread. You also train through the range of the muscle. So when you're doing yoga and Pilates, you don't only work at the end range or the inner range or in a particular position, you work throughout the length of the muscle. So it does help with muscle recovery, it helps with lactic acid removal, all of those type of things. Um I'm trying to think from um from an injury perspective, you know, how will it how will it change your recovery? I think also, you know, I listened to your podcast previously where you talked about strength training and how a lot of people neglect that. Because I think one of the big components of the stiffness and the pain and the tightness that the that the athletes feel is the fact that there's just never an alternative. There's never an off day. It's always running, running, running. There's no cross-training, for example, there's no strength training necessarily, and that's not for everybody. But in my experience, in my practice, most of my patients that come through, their main training method is running. And so we're just moving in the same pattern, and we could we're continuously using the wrong muscles in the same way. The guys that are not stabilizing and firing are not going to magically start starting to fire after 21 kilometers, you know. Um, the other lacking component, and and that definitely Pilates and yoga also addresses, is the eccentric control of it. So the lengthening of muscles and the strength through that lengthening of the muscles. So all of those components will assist with the recovery for the athlete.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Can you use Pilates or yoga to recognize any signs of overload or fatigue?

SPEAKER_02 17:56

Yes, absolutely. So um all so a lot of focus is on individual movement. When you lie on the mat and you're going into your session, a lot of the movements require particular muscles to do particular activities, right? And unfortunately, as humans, we have the nature of um doing a lot of compensatory movements and using alternative muscles to do things because we've got weaknesses. Um so in a in a session, you would really focus on getting those deep stabilizers to work, and so it will be very apparent very quickly that it's not working, and also where the fatigue lies. You know, when the patient starts making a lot of compensatory movements or doing cheats, like we'd say, um, it's because they don't have the resilience and the efficiency in those muscles and also the endurance in those muscles. So now you can imagine if you put momentum behind that and force behind that, it's going to just accelerate and enhance the ineffectivity of what the what the patient is doing. Um so you can, there's definitely early signs. Um you will also often in in sessions we have a lot of clients that cramp and have big responses to small movements, which also shows to me that that muscle is just not efficiently trained to manage the load. The other side of it is that runners are often slightly disconnected with their bodies in the sense that they are always in pain. There's always a level of pain in when you're training because you are pushing your body to do set a certain activity. Um and so you almost disconnect from that pain. And so, where is the balance between it's pain because I have a potential injury starting here, or it's pain because I'm just training? And so Pilates also then and yoga helps to identify that this is not a normal pain that we're feeling because it's so exaggerated in this particular movement that we have.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Tell me, in terms of now the actual type of exercises, is it something that I can do on my own, or I must always go for a class to to do this type of can you just maybe advise on that?

SPEAKER_02 20:06

Sure. So um, you know, I I always have the mindset that something is better than nothing. So doing some sort of core training on your own is better than not doing any core training. And I know a lot of the gyms have moved towards introducing yoga and plastic things as well. But in my opinion and in my experience, the idea was never to have as many people as possible just lying on the floor and doing a movement because it really is about the control of the movement, it's about the precision, the efficiency of the movement, it is about making sure that the body is moving the way it's supposed to without incorporating everything out, anything else. And from a proprioceptive perspective, if you stand and you stand up straight and you look into a mirror and you get the image back, you go, but that's not what it feels like. That what the thing that I see is not necessarily what I feel. And without somebody guiding you and helping you through these sessions, how will you ever know and feel what is the right position? How will you ever know where I am supposed to be in space if what feels is right not necessarily looks right, you know? Um so, in my opinion, it's better to do it in a guidance under an instructor because you can correct what's wrong. Um, and if we use it for rehabilitative purposes, we will often start on a one-on-one basis where we work with the client individually to work on their particular issues because in a class setting it's a generalized class that works on strengthening, but it's not necessarily addressing your right bleak medias or your oblique issue. Um, you know, it's not necessarily get to the getting to that pinpoint. But any type of core training is going to be better than no core training. And there's simple things like planks. I mean, there's a lot of information out there these days that incorporates core training. So you can definitely on your own do core training, but for optimal results, I'd say it's better to work with someone.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Okay. Someone like you, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_02 22:02

There's many of us out there. Pilates in yoga is very popular these days. I think, like I said to you in the beginning, you know, having the knowledge as a physiotherapist, understanding the pathology and the movement patterns, it makes a massive difference as a Pilarsi's instructor. Um because I have the medical knowledge behind it. But the same is also true the other side. And and qualifications, maybe that's something that's also important for our listeners to know. Being a Pilates, or having a Pilates in qualification, they are not all made the same. So just having the certificate saying I'm a Pilates instructor doesn't necessarily mean you're a very good Pilates instructor. So it's really important for the listeners to also research the qualifications that their trainers have. Because your trainer might have gone on a six weeks program, whereas someone else might have gone on a year and a half program. You know, the qualification that I did required a year's commitment to it, and you had to be able to teach the classes, you had to be able to perform the classes, and you had to observe the classes because you need to learn what to look for, you need to be able to cue and guide your client in the right way, and you need to know what it feels like to do this actual exercise.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

I'm coming next week.

SPEAKER_02 23:13

Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

I want to join. Tell me what do I need to do? If I want to come to you, where can I find you? And what do I need to prepare? What am I bringing to the class?

SPEAKER_02 23:24

That's perfect. So, you know, in the year 2026, we have become really smart thanks to COVID and all of these online things. So we have some clients that do online. Again, it's not ideal. It's better to do it in person, but at least you can have someone watching you doing it online and correcting you as we go along. So we do have that sometimes where we can do online sessions. But my practice is based in Randburg, um, in Rand Proc Ridge specifically. And so we have two different ways that clients can get to us. We have an app that is called Octave, and you can book through Octave, you can just research Equikinetics Pilates and you can book through Octave, but we are also Vitality Registered. So we are a Vitality facility. So if you go onto your Vitality Fitness app and you look under the facilities, you can find us. And there's a drive these days from a lot of medical aides to also get active. So often they are free sessions from medical aides and things like that. So you have to book a session because we need to expect you and we need to prepare for you. And then what our clients bring into studio is themselves, comfortable clothes, and maybe a bottle of water, because we've got all of the equipment, we've got um TRX and suspension trainers, we've got small equip equipment like um Pilates balls and foam rollers and magic circles, things that we can challenge the body with without necessarily overloading and causing injury.

SPEAKER_00 24:47

Well, definitely count me in. I'll definitely book a session. I always wanted to come there. Yeah. So I'm making that decision to come there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:59

Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

I bet I guess coming there will help to know what to do at home. Do you give home problems?

SPEAKER_02 25:06

Absolutely, yes. So I think um more from a physiotherapy perspective, you know, knowledge is everything for patients. And if you can teach patients and educate patients and equip them with the knowledge to self-manage, because we all live in a world and I know what runners' schedules look like. I know how demanding it is to run and get the kilometers and everything. So if I can do a couple of sessions with you, progress you sufficiently and give you a program to go home with, and then we meet on an ad hoc basis and you know, or as need be. The point is it's it's amazing to educate patients and to go and work on that. And your Pilates instructor and your physiotherapist and your yogi doesn't have to be your police officer. They can give you the skills and the knowledge that you need, and you can then go forward and apply that. Um, the joy of working with athletes is you guys already like training. You know, we don't have to convince you that you need to train, it's just about incorporating the right type of training to optimize your performance.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

Tell me, you you mentioned earlier about rehabilitation. How does it work? When do you introduce Pilates or yoga in the rehabilitation of sports initiatives?

SPEAKER_02 26:13

Sure. So um because Pilates is and yoga is not necessarily a heavy load activity, we don't necessarily have to wait until you're pain-free or be until we've had um you know optimal uh recovery from uh injury. We can start focusing on the other things because often injuries are results of it's a symptom of something else. So something failed and something else took the brunt of it because it had to pick up the slack. So generally we will, from a physiotherapy perspective, obviously treat the injury and ensure that um the patient is healing, but you can already on the first session you can introduce some Pilates exercises for some of the dysfunctional stabilizers that are not working if that's not where the injury lies. And then, like I said to you, because it's not necessarily heavy load, we can introduce it early on to assist the client to have exercises that they can do, because the other side of working with athletes is that downtime is almost the worst time ever for an athlete. So to say to them that you can't train is almost really, really tough. So to do some sort of cross-training so that we don't aggravate that eccentric Achilles injury that is you know niggling the whole time but actually strengthening in a in an opposite and um uh stabilizing way is really important. Um you want to work on that motor control because motor control is also a common part of injury where there's dysfunctional firing and you're recruiting the wrong muscles at the wrong time. So Pilates and yoga can help with that, but it can be introduced right from the beginning and taken all the way to end rehab. It doesn't have to fit a particular box. You know, Pilates and yoga can be modified for any client of any age group in any sport in with any injury because you can add things, take it away, modify, um, make it easier, make it more difficult. In the 15 years that I've been involved in Pilates, I I still haven't arrived. I still haven't gotten to the point where I feel like I can do everything and it's not a challenge. There's always it's almost like an onion. You keep going into a deeper layer of control every single time that you continue with your Pilates training. So you don't just get stronger, you get more efficient, your body becomes more resilient to the stress that you're putting it under, and you obviously reduce your risk of injury. And talking about yoga, you know, you can complement your training with yoga so that you can increase your mobility and helping the mental recovery as well. Just helping that little bit of a um or having that little bit of a downtime so that you have a solid controlled base with a good functioning nervous system with joints that are working well. Um athletes also range from different age age groups, and we need we do need to look at hormones playing a role in our athletes as well. And again, there are certain changes in our bodies because of hormones changing. So, again, focusing on balance and um ligament laxity or tightness, you know, you can address all of those things in all different age groups in all different um sports.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

Wow, thank you so much, Riley, for that. It has been very informative, very powerful takeaway messages that we're getting. Is there one message you wanna leave for athletes to take away from today's conversation?

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Yeah, please do. Pilates and uh yoga, you know, please incorporate it. So I think if you are starting out with this type of training, you need to keep it simple. Um if you feel like things are just a little bit off in the sense that I just have muscles that are not firing exactly the way, or I've got that one injury that's niggling the whole time, or I'm always stressed and I'm always tired, please add something like Pilates and Yoga to your training regime. You know, the foundation, like I said earlier, is everything. And if your core and your breath is solid, all of your other training is going to be stronger on top of it. So the strength training that you're going to build in these forms of training with Pilates and Yoga is going to build the foundation that everything else is going to stand on going forward. So see this type of training as your foundation, and then the running, the strides, the power, everything else is just going to improve from there on going forward.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

Wow. That's powerful. Thank you so much, Marili, for your time and thank you so much for sharing your expertise today.

SPEAKER_02 30:36

Thank you so much again for having me. And I'm hoping we're going to post a picture of you on the Pilates Mat soon.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

Oh, yeah. Next week. Any telephone number that people can use to phone your practice?

SPEAKER_02 30:49

Sure, it's 082 293 8271. We also have an online booking system that might make it a bit easier for you to inquire from a practice perspective. I'm just going to quickly get that for you as well. Um, but yeah, they can just WhatsApp us on that number. So our online booking system is www.picktime.com backward slash m furry physio. Um, but yeah, just give us a WhatsApp and we'll get back to you.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

Thank you so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 31:23

Thanks so much, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

As we wrap up today's conversation, I want to bring us back to the bigger picture. So often in the sports the forecast is on doing more. More load, more sessions, more intensity. But what today's discussion really highlighted is that progress is not just about how much you train, it's about how well your body is able to handle that training. What palators and yoga offer athletes is not a replacement of strength training or conditioning or skill work, but a powerful way to support all of it. They help build control, awareness, and efficiency. They help athletes recover with intention instead of just waiting for pain or stiffness to grow. And importantly, they teach you to listen to your body because more is returning to long-term interests. From a rehabilitation perspective, what really stood out is that returning to sport is not just about ticking boxes of strengths or fitness, it's about rebuilding trust in movement, understanding your body's fitness, and creating a foundation that supports consistency over time, not just short test of performance. Longevity in sports comes from balance, balancing intensity with control, effort with recovery, strength with movement quality. You really don't have to change the whole program to incorporate Pallatis and yoga. Even small consistent exposure to Pallatis and yoga can make a meaningful difference to how you move, to how you recover and how long you stay in the case. Thank you for joining us again on Moving Trick. If this episode supported you in any way, do pass it forward and inspire someone else.