Mindset shifts that will transform your rehab experience

And life, tbh.

Trust me, I’ve been in your shoes.

Getting injured is so much more than a physical game. It’s an experience that can be frustrating, mess with your head, and wreak havoc on your whole identity. But it can also be an opportunity to challenge beliefs about yourself, and learn transformative strategies that have the potential to change your whole trajectory in physical therapy and in the rest of your life as well.

We live in a high-achieving society where more is better, hustling is a badge of honor, and listening to our body has somehow become shameful. So it makes sense that when we fall short of our unrealistic expectations, we burn out and think there’s something wrong with us. For me and many of my clients, it’s because we’ve been conditioned to operate this way: growing up playing competitive sports, striving for perfection in work and school, often at the expense of our own physical and mental health.

Recovering from an injury is no different, but our progress is almost always a product of complex variables we may not even be aware of at the time: how well have we recovered, are there other stressors in our lives, what are our beliefs about our pain or injury, and so many more that are unique to each situation.

Being honest with our perspective and utilizing these strategies can be transformative in approaching your own rehab and can make this complex experience just a little bit easier.

Scrap the “all or nothing” mindset

I recently had a client who was having trouble fitting her program into her schedule. She felt like a failure because she didn’t feel like she could fit in her exercises each day, or her schedule didn’t allow for a long run like she had planned. These constraints and the expectation of not being able to fit in all of what she intended made her feel like she might as well not do anything at all.

I asked her: “What if you just committed to doing one of the exercises? Even just one set.”

She replied: “Wow. I didn’t even know that was an option.”

It sounds simple but it’s something I see all the time, and fall victim to myself. Progress doesn’t need to look like a complete one-hour workout. It can look like committing to 10 reps of cat-cows and going from there. It can look like doing your 20-minute run that day instead of a 60-minute run. Making the decision simpler can decrease some of the overwhelm or mental burden. And this can often catapult us into building the habit through making a series of smaller decisions, instead of dreading a big one.

While it often appears that so much of life is black or white, the reality is it’s very gray, and unique to each person. Give yourself permission to do some even if it’s not all, because that’s always better than none.

Rest IS productive

I even got a tattoo of this to remind myself.

Another client I’ve been seeing is struggling with some knee pain. She’s in a big training block as a professional athlete, where her volume is more than what she’s ever done in the past. Overall, her symptoms have been managed very well given this increase in overall load, but she is occasionally experiencing some soreness after big weekends of training and games.

She told me: “I’ve been trying to keep working on plyos, strength workouts, because I just need to get stronger right? Then my knees wouldn’t hurt?”

This is where we zoom out. This is a classic example where more is not better. Given the significant increase in volume and load with her external training schedule, it would make sense that her knees may be feeling it a bit more, especially when unintentionally doubling up. So we looked at how quickly that soreness was returning to baseline and shifted focus a bit more toward recovery. Once we honored that, soreness resolved much quicker and she was better prepared going into her games on the weekends.

Forget “no pain, no gain”

I tend to hate generalizations, and this is one that has been ingrained in so many of us.

Pain is complex, and ultimately it’s information. It’s our brain’s way of telling you there’s something worth paying attention to. Sometimes pain can be safe to work through, given the intensity is low and it’s not worsening with a certain movement. Sometimes, often in chronic cases, pain can be an unreliable indicator with a heightened nervous system. But pushing through heightened reproductions of your symptoms is a ticket to a flare-up.

It is not a measure of effort or proof that you’re doing enough.

This doesn’t mean rehab is always comfortable. There’s a real difference between the productive discomfort of building load tolerance and the sharp, lingering, or worsening pain that’s telling you to back off. Learning to distinguish between those two signals is one of the most valuable things that comes out of a good rehab process.

Meet your body where it’s at

One of the hardest things about recovering from an injury, especially for active people, is the gap between who you were and who you are right now. Sometimes the distance between that version of you and the current one can feel enormous and deeply discouraging.

However, the clients who recover best aren’t the ones who fight hardest against where they are. They’re the ones who get genuinely curious about it.

Meeting your body where it’s at isn’t giving up, it’s reality. It means starting from an honest assessment of what’s actually available to you today, not what was available six months ago or what you think should be available by now. It means working with your nervous system instead of against it. And it means building from a real foundation rather than a borrowed one from your past self.

Your body is not broken. It’s adapted to what it’s been through. The work is figuring out what it needs right now, and that starts with actually paying attention to what it’s telling you instead of overriding it.

Progress is rarely linear

This might be the most important thing I tell clients, and the hardest one to actually believe when you’re in the middle of a setback.

As much as we wish recovery looked like a straight line trending upward, more often it looks like a messy chart with a general direction. There will be weeks where everything clicks, and weeks where you feel like you’ve gone backward for no obvious reason. There will be flare-ups that feel like the bottom falling out. There will be days where the thing that didn’t hurt yesterday hurts today. None of that means the process isn’t working.

I look at the rehab process as a big feedback loop: we provide an input with a certain movement, load, intensity, and our body provides an output, a response. As we provide more inputs over time, we’re given a plethora of information that guides our next move. When we progress the input, our body may give back a temperamental output. I always tell my clients that anytime we try something new, it’s very common to have some soreness afterwards. But the behavior of that soreness is also telling: how long did it take to return to baseline? What was the quality of your symptoms? We are slowly building adaptations within a window that is productive, and the reality is there will be ups and downs with that process.

The goal isn’t to have no bad days. It’s to zoom out and see where the last three months of the process has taken you, instead of three days. Pain behavior is complex and there may be factors influencing how we experience it that we aren’t even aware of. Just part of the wild experience of being a human.

I’ve had three ACL surgeries. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re starting over, to one day be skiing the bowls at Copper and the next be non-weightbearing for six weeks. I know what it’s like to freak out that you’ve messed something up when things flare for no obvious reason. But I also know what it’s like to be on the other side of that: skiing hard, moving well, saying yes to things you thought were behind you.

If any of this resonates and you want to talk through what it might look like applied to your specific situation, book a free discovery call. I’d love to chat.

— Jen