Post Rehab Fitness
The Grey Zone…
I think of the period of post rehab “the Grey Zone”. It represents this weird time where we feel like should be back to pre-injury/surgery as a couple of things are in play:
you have been released for fitness by the medical community
pain is significantly less
mentally, you just want to get back to life as it was before the event that made you seek medical attention
At this time, we may feel things are back to normal. However; the tissues around and far away from the actual injury/surgery, are still in the healing process. The acute pain may be gone, but the silent and progressing healing process is still happening within.
Rehab is that time in which they look at the specific part. I.e. you have an ankle injury/surgery you do the ankle bends, circles, write the alphabet, etc. Really focusing at that joint, to make sure that joint can function comfortably and in all ranges of motion.
The grey zone is to account for the before and the after.
Let’s take an ankle. You roll the ankle, and the tendon is damaged in some capacity. You wear the massive boot, you get released from the boot, and make a couple of PT sessions.
And then you want to get right back to where you were prior to the event! So, you do the fitness stuff/physical performance stuff you used to do. However, it just doesn’t feel the same and you feel an athletic performance decline.
You have entered the Grey Zone.
In Grey Zone training, I like to look at, yes, the ankle. However, the more important stuff would be the affected areas while you were dragging the massive boot around. And then what caused the ankle to roll in the first place? What compensation patterns are currently in the body making the whole system inefficient. This is just an example; but a couple of answers to find out:
How are your hip and knee correlating?
What is the upper body doing? Is it locked into a gripping pattern from the previous pain experienced?
Have you worked on your toes? Do you still have big toe propulsion?
The body’s functional patterns can and will significantly change depending on an injury event. And will need to take time for the joint and tissues around it to heal properly. Then to regain range of motion, strength, mobility, and power. that were available prior to the event.
Don’t miss out on the Grey Zone of fitness. It is a great time to reassess and incorporate the important functional mobility training and make necessary tweaks to ensure your physical performance comes back to where it was. It will address and unravel compensation patterns, mitigate further injury, and the best one outcome that comes out of it is to make you stronger than BEFORE the injury event.
This functional training will be a synthesis of things. Trust the process.
Your body will thank you!
