03 Jul A Healthy Return to Play After Taking Off
I’m going to kick this off with an analogy that will hit home.
It’s a bit offbeat, but bear with me.
It’s about alcohol.
Okay, for starters, I don’t drink alcohol anymore. Long story short, it wasn’t serving me and my health and the direction I wanted to go in. You can listen to me go into full detail HERE in a podcast with Dr. Tommy John.
Anyway, speaking of alcohol, think of return to play as not drinking for a while, then the moment you hit the bar, it’s on.
Your tolerance is low. You’re disoriented. Dizzy. You wake up feeling like you hit the goal post. You weren’t prepared! You’re mustering up all your willpower not to get sick and let it out.
And this is the problem: returning to play full force after taking so much time off doesn’t bode well. Just like this. It’s devastating, to say the least.
Especially when we look to the research of spikes in training load leading to injures (Tim Gabbett’s work), we need to be more gradual in our approach.
On a side note, I saw Tim speak at the Seattle Science Conference back in 2015 and he gave the drinking analogy. He’s a genius.
So what should we consider when returning kids to the pitch?
HERE is an article I wrote for Stack.com outlining how to warm-up, strength train, manage load, and recover. Enjoy!
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