Mike Tayler - It's All About The Marketing

Mike Tayler is a 73 year old former marketing executive who took great pleasure in playing rugby for over 34 years. During his mid-50s, however, Mike began to experience pain in his knees that got progressively worse.

This is Mike’s story….

I spent my career working in some of the major advertising agencies in London. When I was young I was a competitive swimmer before I started to play rugby.

I played rugby for over 34 years - for Swansea University, London Welsh, Stevenage, Winchester... I even played against the army, who were some real hard boys! I played for 8 rugby clubs, and doing that while being overweight took its toll on my body.

I gave up playing rugby at 45, and when you give up playing it becomes output over input; you’re no longer burning the calories, so I put on more and more weight and got less active. I used to play in goal for a church football side and I started to get the odd twinge in my knees. But it’s grown worse and worse over the past 15 to 20 years. From about the age of 54 onwards the pain became really bad.

I found I couldn’t walk long distances and the real sadness was I couldn’t run. I realised my body had taken a real battering. In my 40s, a doctor told me I had to lose weight or my skeletal age will be 10 years older than my actual age. There have been times where I’ve had to use a walking stick, which for someone who was always active was quite an eye-opener.

I went for my third COVID jab and the pharmacist was talking to me about all sorts of other things. I told him about my knee problem and that I was waiting for surgery but obviously there’s quite a backlog on the NHS at the moment. So he recommended FlexiSEQ.

I approached FlexiSEQ with a degree of scepticism - as someone who worked in marketing my whole career, I don’t always believe what I hear. That being said, I was really impressed by the FlexiSEQ animation of how the product works. It was incredibly simple and made it easy to understand the product, which was great.

What FlexiSEQ has done for me is it has localised the pain. I had pain all over my right kneecap and just below it as well. Putting on FlexiSEQ has brought all the pain to one place. The surgeon says I probably have bursitis as well. When you have bursitis you usually look to things like frozen peas to help, but FlexiSEQ has been a much easier way of easing the pain.

I use it twice during the day. Then just before bed I put on some Ibuprofen gel as well which gets me through the night, so it’s very rare that I wake up from the pain. When you have bad knees you cannot sleep with one leg on top of the other. I cannot lie on my back because I have sleep apnoea, so I’m supposed to wear a special gum shield but my mad dog has chewed that up. What’s amazing, though, is that I sometimes forget to apply the ibuprofen gel, because the FlexiSEQ is doing the job for me throughout the day.

I am waiting on the knee surgery which was meant to be in six months but now they need to check my sleep apnoea as it might not be good for me to go under general anaesthetic. FlexiSEQ has allowed me to keep going. It’s helped me reduce the pain and make it tolerable, allowing me to get on with my life.

My wife has arrhythmia which means she has an enlarged heart, so she is dependent on me to support her when she goes for a walk. This means that FlexiSEQ has helped her indirectly too, as she relies on me for mobility. FlexiSEQ has allowed me to keep walking and in turn allows her to keep walking with me.

You don’t want too many drugs in your body. Over my life I’ve tended to just tolerate pain but the fact FlexiSEQ is drug-free makes it that much more appealing. I would highly recommend FlexiSEQ; I never used to like recommending products I didn’t believe in when I worked in marketing, so I’m delighted to discover a product that works so well for me.

Has FlexiSEQ helped you #SayYesToLife? If so we’d love to hear from you, let us know on Facebook.