Ever had a nagging injury you couldn’t shake?
You chase your tail in circles and just never get better?
We’re gonna look at 5 potential reasons you’re injury isn’t improving and how to address them to actually improve
1. You Don't Do Anything
How often have you had an injury, taken a week off, went back to the gym and felt the same pain and discomfort?
Let’s be real. We’ve all done it. I know better. You know better. Complete best does nothing to help an injury. In fact, it makes it worse
The body adapts to demands placed on it (SAID principle). If you do nothing, the body will adapt to doing nothing.
This is why you take 3 weeks off and still have pain; if not actually feel worse. The problem with this is you've gone in circles in a vicious cycle of rest/reaggravation
2. You Do Too Much
Now let’s go to the complete other extreme
Rehabbing every day is detrimental. Just because you can tolerate something in the moment doesn’t mean it's beneficial.
Imagine you have an ankle sprain. If your program calls for 2 sets of 15 single leg hops and you feel good, it doesn’t mean 4 sets is better
Now you’ve exceeded the tissue’s capacity for work and the next day your ankle is more swollen than the day prior. Congrats, you’ve now prolonged your rehab and delayed the healing response.
You will never fix an injury in a single rehab session but you can definitely make it worse.
Athletes assume more is better so they do more. A lot of rehab is protecting the person from themselves.
Same as in the gym, you can only repair the injury when you have time to recover
3. The Tissue Needs More Time To Heal
This is the frustrating part. Tissue has healing time. No matter how minor or severe, there is going to be a length of time that has to pass before an injury heals
You can do everything right but you still can't make a grade 3 sprain heal in 2 weeks.
Sometimes, if you aren’t better; it’s because the injury simply hasn’t had enough time to heal
We have a million interventions to throw at injuries; modalities, soft tissue work, rehab, peptides, supplements, PEDs, the list goes on.
There is one single variable that is guaranteed to be present when an injury heals:
TIME
4. You Keep Hurting Yourself
Most people tend to get an injury, go through their rehab process (if they even do one, refer back to point 1) and immediately jump back to where they left off in their training. This is a recipe for disaster.
A safe rule of thumb is to take as long as you missed with injury to get back to the level of training you were doing when the injury happened.
You missed 3 weeks from the gym with a pec strain? Ideally you want to take 3 weeks to get back to the same intensity/weight/volume you are accustomed to.
Can you go faster? Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and the guideline above is hardly a rule. Just know that rushing back to training after an injury is how you stay in the injury cycle.
I get this might be annoying and I can’t stop you from doing anything. But tell me what’s worse? Taking 3-4 weeks to get reacclimated to training or missing 3 months because you get reinjured every 2 weeks?
Take your time. Properly return to activity
5. Your Rehab Is Too Easy
I had an athlete check in after PT
"What'd you do? Ice and stim plus band work?"
"Yeah, how'd you know?"
Unfortunately this is something I see far too often and it’s a similar story shared with me by virtually everyone I work with. Whether you want to blame PTs, Doctors, insurance companies, whoever. It doesn’t change the fact that easy rehab doesn’t help you.
There is nothing wrong with the interventions mentioned above IF they do not compose the bulk of your work AND they are done in the early stage of rehab. Quality rehab should resemble strength training more than “rehab”
In my opinion, rehab should only “look like rehab” 10-15% of the time. Hard rehab is good rehab
If you're struggling with an injury and need help, reach out to us here
Excellent!