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מאת Olivier Poirier-Leroy

מעטים הדברים שיוצרים תסכול גדול יותר מאשר להיות "מורחק" מהעיסוק האהוב עליך בגלל פציעה. חבריך לקבוצה מתאמנים ומשתפרים ואילו את/ה יושב/ת בצד מושבת.

הנה 5 טיפים שיעזרו לך להתמודד יותר בקלות עם החזרה מפציעה:

  1. יהיו עליות, ויהיו גם ירידות
  2. השיקום אינו מוגבל לחדר הטיפולים
  3. היה/י נחוש/ה לחזור טוב/ה יותר
  4. שתף/י
  5. זו הפעם האחרונה!

There are fewer things in the world more frustrating than being sidelined from the sport you love with an injury. While your teammates train and get better you are sitting in the stands in crutches, feeling helpless and frustrated.

Here are 5 tips to help you bounce back from injury:

1. There will be ups, and there will be downs.

Over the course of the recuperation you will go through a roller coaster of positive and negative emotions.

There will be positive moments where you feel better enough to tempt jumping right back into the swing of things. More often than not our excitement to get back into the water leads to a re-aggravation or worsening of the original injury.

The most pronounced swings are the downs that come with missing or cutting back on training. Some days you will even feel worse, which may lead you to ignoring rehab work because you feel that things have become utterly hopeless.

Do your best to keep an even keel over the course of your recuperation through both the highs and the lows so that you can come off the IR in a timely manner.

2. Rehab takes place outside of the therapist’s office too.

It can be tempting to test the limits of your injuries, especially on those days where you are feeling even better than usual. Be intelligent about the lifestyle decisions you are making outside of your rehab work so that you can facilitate a faster recovery.

Things like sleep, nutrition, extra-curricular activities on the weekends, will all assist in determining how fast you heal up or not.

3. Be determined to come back even stronger.

Yes, it totally and completely blows that you are injured. But guess what? It happens to everyone, including the best swimmers in the world.

Ryan Lochte tore his MCL and strained his ACL just last fall. Michael Phelps broke his wrist less than a year out from the Beijing Olympics. James Magnussen, the fastest 100m freestyler in the history of the sport in a textile, has lived with a degenerative back disease for a number of years.

What matters not necessarily is what happens to you, but how you decide to deal with, and how you decide to come back from it.

4. Participate.

Probably the surest way to insure that you don’t re-injure yourself in the same manner is to educate yourself on the injury you’ve been dealt. Feel free to pepper your therapist and/or doctor with questions to get a clear a grasp on what happened. Because once you know why it did, you are more likely to seek out preventative measures in the future.

  • What happened?
  • Why did this injury happen?
  • Is this a common injury (with swimmers)?
  • What do I have to do in the future to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

At the end of the day, it is your body so it would behoove you to educate yourself on how it works, and also how it breaks down.

5. Never Again.

In the event of an injury your coach, physical therapist and/or doctor should provide a prehab routine. These are helpful especially in the case of chronic injuries (ahem, shoulders), and should be continued long after the injury has fully healed up.

The only thing possibly more frustrating than getting injured is knowing that you had the tools and mechanisms to prevent it, and didn’t use it. Make prehab a part of your daily workout routine moving forward, and you will decrease the likelihood of that injury becoming a chronic one.