Observations about rehab

Career Interrupting Injuries
S ome Observations
about coming back from injuries

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These are all things that I'm quite aware of when on the comeback trail, so I do my best to avoid the traps they set. For those of you who are reading this, now you're warned.
You will rehab an injury, and completely forget which side it was on.

It's hard to look ahead when you're injured and realize that someday soon, it won't hurt anymore. That's a great day when pain subsides or ceases, you feel tremendous success and relief. Just be aware there's a danger lurking because of this progress. The area is still weakened compared to the other side, but in your mind they feel the same.
Example: I have an injury from last year on the side of my left knee. I have another older one on the front of my right knee. During skating, there's no way I can remember which is which, and I really can't feel these injuries unless there's a lot of strain. Were these injuries more recent, or poorly rehabilitated, there could be danger of reinjury. It's virtually impossible to favor an injury that you forget about.
Solution: don't end your rehab too soon. Don't believe what the injury tells you. Use common sense and discipline to push your rehab farther.
This has happened to me a number of times. I hurt a knee or ankle, came back from it, then completely forgot which one it was that was hurt. I'm usually pretty thorough about my training, so I haven't reinjured too often. But I can't say the same thing about some of my friends, whose careers in various sports were cut short by lazy rehab schedules. They trashed the same injury over and over until they couldn't take it any more, and switched from sports to sports TV.
It's a strange thing about the body that once you rehab an injury, it fails to hurt very much once you warm it up. After a while, other aches and pains take precedence, and you forget all about the old injury. Then all of a sudden, you go and strain the old area and reinjure it. The basis of this problem is a failure to follow through on your rehab. Just because it doesn't hurt any more doesn't mean the rehab is done and training is over, and yet this is exactly what most athletes will do. They'll just forget about their rehab training once it feels uninjured.
One thing I've noticed about my aquaintances who seemed to get knocked out of their sport by a fairly minor injury, is they usually succumb to reinjury, and repeated reinjury. They failed to make the injured area stronger than it was before, a necessary goal in rehab from CII's, which insidiously tend to reoccur.
You rehab a joint fully, but it feels different.

This condition is sort of the opposite from the last one.
This is a phenomena that can be really frustrating, because it psyches you out. You come back from an injury, it is essentially fully healed, but it feels funny. So you then become afraid to push the joint like you did before.
I believe this happens because when you rehab say, a knee with strained ligaments or tendons, you build up all the muscles around it. You let the tendons heal while reinforcing the muscle structure around them. After you're fully healed, the joint is in fact different than it was, now having powerful muscles around weakened or recovering tendons and ligaments.
Solution: You have to accept that you can get your leg to perform like you did before, and hopefully better, but it's never going to feel quite the same. You can try to cue moves off the other leg that you used to do off the injured and rehabbed leg. That will of course feel different as well, but perhaps in a less annoying way.
Eventually these types of mental annoyances work themselves out as you forget what it used to feel like and just live in the present.
You favor an injured area, and put other parts of your body at risk.

This is a nasty one. I've seen guys do this a lot. They come back from an injury pretty well, but they didn't finish training before coming back. Now they risk not only reinjuring the original joint, but blowing out some other joint due to trying to keep the impact away from the weak area. The classic is a guy who sprains his ankle, comes back from it too soon, tries to avoid hitting the ankle, and winds up spraining his knee. In other words, going from bad to worse.
Part of favoring an injured area involves putting a brace on it, which tends to transfer impact to other areas. So in effect, part of the healing process becomes a danger to uninjured areas. If you really beef up your ankle with tape, you may be putting your knee at risk, because the immobilized joint is going to make your shin act as a lever on your knee. It's like a domino effect of leg injuries.
Solution: Obviously, finish your rehab before skating full on. But in my experience, it works a lot better to "test" the injury at a low impact. In other words, skate normally and don't avoid using the injured area, but keep it at a much lower speed or effort than you were doing before the injury. This type of movement will usually make a trick feel much more "technical" than free flowing. It's constraining, but it will reduce impact. The only danger is that by constraining your movement, you may strain a muscle, or "tweak" the injured joint. But that's probably better than incurring another impact injury.
Wear a brace on the joint and just keep at that low level of effort, gradually working up to more. It makes a lot more sense than going full out, but just trying to avoid stress on the injury. By testing the injury gently, you keep building it up under actual use. Eventually you can take the brace off and increase the use of the joint back to the stress level of the past. This will spare your other joints and put the healing joint to its best use.
Another method that I use is to wear more clothing when I'm injured. Instead of putting on a brace I may put on a pair of pants over my shorts. This makes for more restricted movement and slows me down while not putting any more compression directly on the injury. It's another way of just taking my performance level down a knotch while trying to come back.
Every bad injury represents a level in your progress.

There's no clearer indicator of where you are in your sport than the level you were when you got injured. In a sense, an injury represents a wall that you hit while trying to progress.
Say you were at the level of a certain trick when you got hurt attempting it. When you rehab from the injury, a major test comes when you have to confront that trick again. You are then right at the point where you hit the wall in the past.
Looking at it from the point of view of prevention, it's good to keep in mind that whenever you try a difficult trick or manuever, you are in danger of hitting the wall. You might get injured here, or here might simply be the technical level you just can't get past. You don't want to get so aggressive trying something that you risk knocking yourself out of the box. At the same time, you can't just gradually sneak up to a difficult trick, because it requires aggression.
Usually the best compromise is to try a fairly aggressive and dirty attempt at a trick, trying to get all the way through it, with flawed execution, but with all the elements in place, start to finish. Once you complete a dirty, complete, and safe attempt, you can go back and clean up all the separate elements. That way, you don't just work away at the beginning while ignoring the end, which can lead to injury. For example, it's important to work on the landing of a aerial trick before you have the beginning and middle perfected, because the landing is usually the most dangerous part.
Getting through the wall that a hard trick represents means not slamming into it through injury. So try to break apart the elements of the trick and practice them separately. Then a confident attempt can be made without thinking that you are just hurling yourself into the unknown. I've written about this method elsewhere, in the "Drawbridge Effect" in my mental attitudes section.

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