Coming back from injury
Rehab is the easy part to describe and the hard part to live. A guide to the weeks where the body is ready before the head is.
Injury & recovery
Most injury advice is written for the body. This page is for the rest of you: the part that watched the season go past from the side of the pool, and is now being told it is cleared.1
Being cleared is a medical statement. Being ready is something else, and nobody can sign it off for you.
What the first week back actually feels like
Expect the strange combination of relief and dread. Relief that you are allowed back; dread at the gap between what you remember being able to do and what your body does now.
- Sessions feel longer than the clock says
- Splits you used to hit without thinking are suddenly a negotiation
- You catch yourself protecting the injury even when it does not hurt
- Teammates are kind, which is somehow worse
All of this is normal. None of it means the comeback is failing.
I was back in the pool for three weeks before I was back in the pool. The physio cleared my shoulder. Nobody cleared my head.
Signals that you are pushing the wrong thing
Pain that changes its pattern, sleep that gets worse the closer you get to a hard session, and the urge to test the injury rather than train through a plan are all signals to slow the timeline, not speed it up.
Keep a short diary for the first month. Three lines a day is enough: what you did, how it felt during, how it felt that night. Patterns show up in a week that you would never notice day to day. Sports Medicine New Zealand has a plain-language guide to reading those patterns.
Who to talk to
Your physio owns the tissue. Your coach owns the plan. Nobody automatically owns the space between, which is where most comebacks wobble.
- Tell your coach what the physio actually said, in the physio's words, not your summary of them
- Agree a review point two weeks out, before either of you is tempted to skip it
- If the fear is louder than the pain, say so. It is a training variable like any other, and you can raise it here if you would rather not say it out loud
Take these with you
Footnotes
- 1
Cleared usually means the injured tissue has reached a measured strength or range threshold. It says nothing about confidence, fear of re-injury, or how it feels to be lapped by people you used to beat. ↵