Recently because I’m a football fan I’ve been reading about recovery of the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts.  His name is Andrew Luck and he’s a professional athlete who was the next up and coming superstar in the league.

That is, until he badly tore the labrum in his shoulder and had to have surgery.  The whole thing was mismanaged by his medical staff and it’s a long story, but the point of the whole thing is this:  He did not take a snap last football season and has been out of football for over a year due to rehab.

This is a professional athlete with access to daily physio, the best surgeons in the game and things like stem cell treatments, and he still has not thrown a football in over a year.  A year.  This is a guy who throws a football for a living and he’s not doing it to let his injury recover for a YEAR.

I’ll ask you a simple question:  if he’s taking that long to recover with access to all of those resources, what makes you think that you can recover from an injury any faster?

Typical labrum tear surgery recovery is 3-4 months but can easily stretch into 6-9 months if things aren’t dealt with properly.

Over the years I’ve dealt with hundreds of injuries.  One thing that I really try to get across to my clients is that if you are hurt, you need to give your body time to heal and recover from whatever it is.  This takes TIME.  Usually a period of weeks if not months.  For some reason my Type A people seem to think that if they just baby a problem for a couple of weeks and then go right back into doing whatever they were doing before they will be fine.

Or even worse, they do physio but keep on doing the same activity that caused the injury in the first place and expect to recover.  I had an example of that just last week and when I pointed it out to my client that not stopping the activity meant it would just get worse again she was for some reason completely dumbfounded.

Does this make sense?

The general guidelines for minor injuries is 4-6 weeks.  More severe ones are 6-12 weeks.  Surgery is anywhere from 3-6 months at LEAST depending on the issue.

My main point is this:  we need to exercise patience as a society when it comes to our bodies.

Whether it comes to recovering from an injury, things like weight loss or achieving a goal like running a marathon, you need to exercise patience to succeed.

Setting a goal for recovery is just like any other goal – there is a timeline and a process involved.  Sometimes it means not moving anything for a couple of weeks.  Sometimes it is moving just a little bit as much as you can as frequently as you can to help the healing process.  It can be frustrating and feel like it’s taking forever.  But you have a long time to achieve whatever it is you’re trying to do.

If you want to be active and healthy for a lifetime, then taking six months to recover from an injury might represent less than 1% of your athletic or active life over a span of fifty years.  You’re not missing anything by taking that time to make sure that whatever happened doesn’t happen again.

Be patient now, be consistent and give it time and you will succeed in your recovery.  Rush back into activity and have a setback or make the situation worse and suddenly a six-week process becomes six months.

If an NFL player can not touch a football for a year, you can wait three months to rehab from surgery.  Don’t think that your body or recovery process is any different.  Patience and consistency wil get you results every time.

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