Getting injured sucks, but most orthopaedic injuries, you can make a full recovery from.

Unfortunately, most people DONT get told this, they assume they’ll be damaged for life

Here are some points to consider to make a full recovery…

Taking “time off” does NOT make it an injury heal faster
One of the biggest fallacies in all of fitness and medicine is this idea that if something hurts, if you get a strain or sprain, then just DONT exercise at all for X number of weeks, give to heal, the problem…

This approach leads to the affected muscle/joint healing WEAKER than it was before.

Now when you return to activity, you have a healed but less strong muscle/joint, and you are likely to be injured again

-example, this is why ankle sprains are incredibly recurrent

For any injury, you want to get back to moving as soon as possible,

Movement does not mean heavy exercise, but it does mean doing whatever small amount of movement the body is capable of

Effective Rehab requires LOADING the damaged muscle/joint
This means doing exercises of course, and most physical therapists understand this in theory, But in practice, effective loading often does not get done

Loading means putting the issues/joint under stress

Stress comes from load, which comes from using weights/resistance.

The healing process in tendons and ligaments REQUIRES loading for the connective tissue to remodel itself properly. It reduces the possibility of a weakened joint due to scar tissue

What does this look like in practice?

It looks like using strength training exercises as soon as you can, with whatever load your tissues can tolerate.

You need to Strengthen ALL the muscles that affect joint function
I make this point for shoulders a lot, but it applies to all joints.

This requires knowing all the muscular functions of the function, and then directly training all the muscles reponsible

Using the shoulders as an example, its very common for people to be given external rotation exercises for a rotator cuff issue

But whats overlooked is all the other muscles that direct shoulder function

You can apply this to knees, ankles, hips, even wrists

Every major joint has multiple muscles, not just one or two, so why arent all of them being addressed in the rehab process?