Three Tips to Make & Maintain Progress After Injury
If you are in any sport long enough, aches and pains will find you. The more elite level you reach in athletics the finer the line becomes between glory and major injury. Injury, however, can create a great new perspective on what you need to work on. The time after injury does not need to be one of minimal to no progress. While not all attributes can be maintained or improved an athlete can still return better than before. Here are three tips I personally use to make sure of this.
1. Stick to the Habits of Your Old Routine
Major injury and surgery has a way of jarring just about anyone from their usual routine. Loss of function, difficulty moving around on crutches, and pain from the procedures are all viable excuses to break routine. While surely things need to be adapted the core point is: do not change what you do. If you are someone who values training, which many of you reading will, you enjoy the gym. You may have Mondays as Squat night or maybe Friday Night is always back and biceps. Whatever the routine there is no reason to change it. If you have created a three or four-time-a-week habit of going to the gym, do not lose that habit simply because of setback of injury. Pivot around the injury while keeping the habits that made you successful in the first place prior to injury. This might mean taking your usual, rather rigorous full body style training split and making it all upper body to fit around a knee injury, alternating between big upper body muscle groups and cardio and rehab on off days.
Now, I know many will say “it is impossible to keep my old habits, I can’t walk,” or “Doctor says to just rest”. Don’t be a slave to the exact old routine, but do be diligent in keeping the same habits of the old routine. If you had a strict diet before there is no need to gain 50 pounds on the couch eating ice cream. Pivot the diet you had and adjust. Perhaps try a more macro friendly approach buying foods that are easier to prepare or keep around if you are unable to prep for yourself. This might mean working in foods like protein bars, frozen dinners, maybe even having food delivered from local restaurants that have nutrient consistency, which you might be shocked is most fast food. It might not be ideal, but that is not what we are going for. You are aiming for habits that will push us in any degree of positive direction.
In keeping with the habits of routine you should quickly notice how you can piece together habits to make the rehab and difficult down time easier. This might be making sure to use the restroom first thing in the morning and then get dressed in the bathroom if you have a lower leg injury so less times you need to stand up. We might then get dressed in workout clothes right away because we know we have a mid-morning or afternoon appointment for rehab or training and it saves a trip up the stairs. These are not new concepts. We do them every day but with injury and limitations it becomes so much more important to be efficient. Streamlining preparation, exercise prescription and daily tasks will make it so much easier to stick to the basis of routine.
Sticking with routine and having a sense of control over diet, sleep, training and even work schedule will go very far in the often overlooked side of mental health. You need to remember that it will be neither ideal nor easy. However, through the habits you string together and through the act of keeping routine we can make a small percentage of forward progress daily which will lead to large amounts of progress in the long term.
2. Reinvent Yourself
It might seem contradictory to say stick to your old routine and yet reinvent yourself, bear with me. Long rehabilitation times and reflection after surgery have a way of seeing circumstances through a different lens. Often times before injury you might be biased to seeing something from only one perspective. You begin to identify yourself by the sport you do and, even times more specifically, by what you are good at in that said sport. The use of terms like “poverty bencher” come to mind in reference to powerlifters who have a bench press that is not to the same caliber as their squat and deadlift might be. During this time of injury you can fix that. You can branch out of our comfort zone and reinvent yourself.
From within the sport of which you participate you can take a new approach to training. Maybe you were biased to being big and strong and now with injury you can focus on what you neglected, such as speed or conditioning. Maybe you let your bodyweight and bodyfat creep up too fast prior to injury and you can use the down time to make progress on composition and blood work to stay healthy long-term. No matter what the example, the idea remains - you need to look outside of your current identity and experiment with a new challenge. This new challenge will likely help you in the future after injury. If you always feared hard cardio before, this is the time to crush that cardio if injury allows. Maybe you feared certain exercises and got away with skipping them. Now rehab might force you to do them as you realize they are necessary. Make them exercises you now seek to dominate. This is the time to overcome the fear and use this as a way to become a better version of yourself before returning.
Looking outside the realm of sport we might find this is a time to reinvent our mind and spirit. Taking on more education and mindfulness through reading and meditation might be an example of this reinvention. Again, we likely neglected this or might have seemed odd for our prior identity to take part in. What we choose to focus on here can have positive effects on improvement in our jobs, career and even family and relationship dynamics. True physical greatness will never be achieved without a conscious and subconscious control of the mind. Injury will allow you to harness this and be better prepared when your body is physically capable. Relief of stress by navigating broken and strained relationships or resolving work conflicts will free up resources when ready to push to our physical limits.
3. Embrace the Obstacle
Of the three tips this is the more difficult and yet easiest to explain. You need an obstacle to drive you. Ignore the need and an obstacle will still smack you in the face someday somehow. You need something to overcome. You can believe “it shall pass” all day long and lets pray and hope it does. But if it doesn’t? What will you do? Fight it! Find joy in knowing that each day in recovery you are winning against the obstacle. Know that each day you work to overcome an injury you are setting yourself up for something great. That reward might be delayed but surely it will come. You will use the obstacle of this injury to be a catalyst for something in your life, whether it be in sport or not you will make something of this injury and rehabilitation.
Make a decision to be better in spite of obstacles, no matter what, and pain and suffering will never be wasted in becoming a better self.
