From the moment that you get injured, a mental countdown starts until the day you are able to return to your sport. During those days, weeks, or months leading up to your return, you’re probably thinking about how to regain fitness, and how to best support your own goals and those of your team.
When you are allowed to return, wanting to make up for lost time can cause the urge to overtrain. However, it is important to understand that being technically allowed to start training again doesn’t mean that you should immediately return to the same workouts and intensity that you were training at pre-injury. Being “cleared” means that your specific injury has healed, but there are other factors at play. Even though it can be painful to admit, it is important to recognize that your muscles around your injury can get weaker during injury. Additionally, familiarity, or muscle memory, with your sport has faded a little. In other words, you are a little rusty.
At this point, the biggest mistake that you can make is to treat your body and training patterns as they were before injury. Pushing your body too hard and too fast can cause chronic injury cycles, where a small injury that you worked so hard to heal becomes recurring, leading you to be continuously sidelined. This can be avoided through staying consistent with your physical therapy and return to sport plans alongside building up your training.
When it comes to practically returning to training at high volume, the slow build is very important. This will feel slow and frustrating, but you have to trust your mental and physical strength. Your body has not lost all of its fitness. In fact, there may be some silver linings to the injury that has caused you to take a break from your sport. When I was injured, I did not run because of a fractured bone, but my body was suffering in other, unseen ways from the cumulative stress that a summer of intense training caused. Mandated rest not only allowed my bone to heal, but also allowed my body to rest and learn to train other muscles. My fitness has improved in many ways, despite not being able to train my primary sport at all.
Being injured is extremely difficult mentally, and returning from injury can be even more difficult in some ways. While your body heals, your mind is building up a defense mechanism to try to prevent future injuries and the suffering that they cause. For the short term return, goals should be defined in terms of small victories, or checkpoints on your way to recovery. Instead of trying to run a personal best right out of the gate, try to stay consistent with feeling strong and being able to complete practices, even if they are modified or shortened.