An Athlete’s Road to Recovery
Focus on the physical as well as the psychological side of sports injuries.
Anyone that has ever done any form of sport will know what an injury feels like. You feel like you’re doomed and forever forced into spending the rest of your life on the sofa, becoming more and more unfit and unhappy because you can no longer achieve the buzz from the sport you love!
You believe you’ll never fully recover, you’ll never achieve the same level of fitness, and you’ll end up watching others in awe as they run, cycle and perform athletically in your once favorite activity. You begin thinking about what might be if it wasn’t for “that” injury!
Well, there is a lot to take in when you get injured in your sport.
If an injury is a new experience for you, you’ll no doubt just try to fight through the pain. If it becomes too intense, you’ll stop and go home to rest up, and you’ll be looking forward to your next training day once you feel ready.
However, as the years go on, and you experience more injuries or recurring injuries, your head takes over, as the pain comes second to the thoughts running through your head!
Injuries affect you psychologically as well as physically.
So, what’s the difference between the first time you suffer an injury to the fifth, tenth, or hundredth time? It is that little voice inside your head that speaks from experience, from bad memories of injuries that time and time again have caused setbacks and practically meant starting from scratch to build back up to your best fitness levels. It might even seem like the end of your sporting journey.
But do you know what, an injury can be just as simple as getting a flat tire on a bike. Everyone that owns a bike will get a flat tire, if you can figure out why you got yours, slowly repair it checking not to cause further problems and once fixed try to avoid the reason you got it in the first place. Things should be back to normal without a hitch.
This, however, is easier said than done with an injury as the constant complaints and worries from that inner voice make you question and doubt if you really will ever be back to normal and even if/when you are back then trying to perform to your best without those questions and doubts can have an extremely negative impact.
So, what is the best way to deal with and overcome an injury?
Well, first things first, “the basics,” the physical aspect. The minute you pull up with that pain, stop! Try to get some ice on the area, try to isolate it, and, if possible, elevate it. If you’re unsure of the injury, then get it checked by a specialist. Understand your rehab exercises, and once ready, do them sensibly and slowly return to training.
Now comes the tricky part… You’ve got to manage your thoughts, and the psychological aspect comes into play. Take this time to figure out what the pain is and why it might have come on. If it’s something obvious like a lousy tackle in football or a fall on your bike, then great, that’s actually good news in psychological injury terms.
Even if it’s a severe injury, you can quite simply put that injury down to the sport. It was probably something that wasn’t very avoidable and could have happened to anyone in that situation. Although it can be challenging to overcome the fear of a similar incidence in the sport itself, the injury should be similar to someone suffering their first injury in the sense that once you feel ready and begin your rehab and training it won’t be long until you see yourself as fully fit and recovered.
However, it gets a bit trickier when the reason for the injury is not so apparent. In these cases, you’ve got to think about any differences that might have occurred for you to get hurt when usually doing the same thing a hundred times before you haven’t been hurt, i.e., pulling up with a muscle tear when running.
What to do during the recovery process.
This is where you should try to manage your activities better in the future. It can come down to a lot of external training factors such as, not sleeping enough the night before, not eating or hydrating enough before the sport, not warming up sufficiently, if it was too cold or too hot that day, plus many other factors you can think of that should be considered for your future planning. So the planning element can take some time but the good news is, as you’re injured, you’ve got time. Spend this time detailing the external training factors * that you’ll add to your training session plans.
As mentioned, the recovery process can start the moment you get injured. You can use the time that you’re “out” of your sport to train aspects of your health and fitness that may normally be jeopardized. Let’s say you have an ankle injury.
You won’t be doing any work on your ankle until it’s ready for rehab but you can for example work on other parts of your body that might usually get less attention during training sessions so, for instance, you could do upper body exercises or more specifically you could improve your hip mobility or other joints range of movements or even simpler you can better your overall body flexibility.
As well as the physical aspects that you can work on, you can spend the time to improve your knowledge of your sport. If your sport has tactics, you can brush up on your knowledge. If you’re into racing, you can master the racing lines of your sport. If your sport uses equipment, then you can improve on your setup of any equipment that you use.
What I’m saying here is, you don’t usually have this time out of your training routine, or competition events, so use this time to your advantage to improve things in your sport than you would usually take for granted.
Return from injury better than you ever were.
After spending your time during the injury getting better for your sport in other ways spoken about above and once you start to feel ready to rehab your injury, do not rush back into your sport!! Again, take your time, rehab properly, strengthen the injured area. You can make your injured area better than it was before the injury.
You can improve its strength, flexibility, range of movement, and physical presence so that when you do come back, you’ll be ready, not just physically, but psychologically, you’ll know you’re ready, and you’ll come back and compete better than you ever did before.
