I sit at 5,000m altitude every day for 20 minutes. There’s a tonne of research that says if you spend intermittent time at altitude it can help spinal injuries. So I have a machine in my room and I try to make sure I sit on it every day.

Five thousand metres, that’s pretty high up. It is more than half the height of Mount Everest or five Munros. So 20 minutes is enough. I start getting a sore head if I am on it any longer. The fact altitude can help spinal injuries was also something I told myself when I was cycling up the Alps.

When it comes to rehabilitation, I do all the hard stuff. I put on lycra, cycle for hours and go to the gym. But the altitude machine is an example of the other stuff I do that people might not think about. There is maybe have 10 hours a week of structured rehabilitation and the same again in non-structured rehabilitation.

I’m not really a religious person. I come at a lot of stuff from a science background so it is hard to do the spiritual side too. What it is, is what people would call mindfulness. I use all the holistic stuff. I have all the diffusers blowing out certain oils.

I did two hours of neuro muscular stimulation today on my arm, while I was watching the athletics from Glasgow. This is electrical stimulation from something called a Compex machine which I strap onto my arm for two hours and try to get the fibres moving.

Then I sat with something from America, called trans-cranial direct simulation which sends afferent and efferent signals between the brain and the body.. You wear a special headset. There are two different kind of signals travelling towards the brain and signals going away from the brain. This one sends signals away from the brain.

In between all of that I am listening to podcasts on my bike and learning how to heal better. Learning why certain thoughts are going into my head, trying to stop negatives dropping in to my subconscious.

Some of my stuff has been for free - Compex UK have a deal with the Olympic sports where you can get one of these neuro muscular machines for £500, while the halo guys in America gave me a head set for free because they were in the early days of testing. But I must have about £4,000 worth of kit in my room.

And while I try not to think about it last year I spent over £20,000 on rehab stuff that didn’t work. It was all this DNA stuff, genetic stuff. I couldn’t get an appointment with a neutral who could tell me honestly about its merits. I got 19 pages in the post which didn’t tell me anything. But I got it anyway.

When you are ill, whether it is tumours, cancer, diabetes, you are searching for hope and people dangle things in front of you. Even when your rational brain is telling you it is not worth your money your limbic system is five times stronger, crying out ‘I need a cure, I need a cure’.

That is why the internet is a really dangerous place for people who have cancers and stuff. It is a million dollar industry and it is driven by people’s emotional brains and I know that because I have been on the opposite side of those calls and emails and paid money to people.

So what I do these days is just try to be open minded. I try to have that growth mindset, that anything could work. Even if it just a placebo effect, then brilliant. Yes I have wasted money and not made some great decisions on things that didn’t work but I’ve learned from them, like you do in every mistake from life.

I see these daily podcasts as a key ingredient in my rehab. I listen to a guy called Rich Roll and a psychologist he works with called Dr Michael Gervais. Not to be confused with Ricky. He was talking about mastering your mind so you can make your subconscious conscious. Training yourself so your brain doesn’t run you, you run your brain. But working on your inner self is seriously hard.

A lot of people see rehab as just one thing, but here are possibly three of four areas to it – one is looking after the mind, one is exercise, one is nutrition and one is being able to switch off. When you can do all four, then you can heal.

It is like a full-time job. You have got to commit. Every athlete knows if you work hard and do all the right stuff then you get the rewards. But if your motivation is to live, then how could you not work as hard as possible? You take the athletes’ mindset and think ‘this is my race’. The only person that keeps me surviving on the street is me.

I left you last time with a cliff-hanger, as I prepared to ride outdoors for the first time since September. Well, to get on my bike, first I have got to get into my kit with one arm and one leg, which is a bit of a faff. When it comes to my cycling shoes, the right one is a normal shoe but the left is an artificial foot orthotic which goes into the shoe. So by the time I had got that on, I just thought ‘you know what, I am going to go’. So I didn’t bother getting a taxi out to the park. I just rode all the way. I have been out twice more already this week. The weather has been beautiful.