No progress feels
This is your reminder (and most of all to myself !!) that even the smallest steps still move you forward. Keep showing up.
Whether you're coming back from an injury or illness, or working toward a specific goal, it can be easy to feel like you're not making progress. The day to day can feel like a grind with no reward. But I promise those little actions will add up to something great as long as you keep going
The frustration is real. Injury happens in a flash. One day you’re getting a double lache at ninja warrior you’ve dreams of competing in one day, the next you’re buying crutches cos you just can’t walk anymore. The acl journey is a long slow one. Trust me. I’ve been here before - well the learning to walk biz, following brain surgery. And this is longer and slower! Here’s 3 tips I want to remember and to share with anyone else feeling the no progress feels.
Sitting with the failure:
I think the sitting with my failure was an important part. For maybe a week ! Then I feel I was quickly onto what can I do with one leg or maybe just what can I do. Cos you always can! My mission to help people to connect to their current body, in all its glory! And to find a way to just begin. Because movement literally can change you: it can change your mindset, your mental health, your physical health, your internal alchemy and your external appearance.
Tactics for frustration moments:
Moments, days, weeks, months omg they all frustrate. Sometimes they get you so down. Watching has its limits. I’m a doer!
Tennis? I now skip on the outside and take a weight and move thru my movement basics. Building foundations savagely well! Oh and skipping is self limiting meaning the rope gets me before shin splints have a chance to set in with over use in a poor posture.
Surfing? Beach lengths are my new progress reports. Walk the length, jog it, beat it back, beat that each time! Barefoot soft sand running is self correcting and I cannot run thru knee pain but I am beating those times so no pain there!
Climbing and ninja? These hurt to watch most. But these are my fire. I want to get back to these the most but they feel the furthest away with good falling technique the most out of reach considering hyperextension fears again. And so I hamgbpard, rope swing, and now take my weights and try to workout watching my boys enjoy themselves using their useful bodies!
Posture? Yes it’s changed and posture is your snapshot of how your body is using movement. Mine is leaning forward so I’m more in my hamstrings than my quads. I’ve stopped using my glutes and low back pain has resulted. Myofascial release and specific vastus medialis and inner hamstring exercises help my body’s pressure release from gravity and the things I am able to do. I can feel them improving, cramping less, moving in their own more!
Just one more:
This is my favourite rule for myself. I’ll just do a couple more. I can do that. That’s where you get your strongest, when you think you can’t go anymore. Keep letting yourself keep going. Until you really can’t, which is after that moment you thought!
And finally, it’s tempting to look for more acl recovering exercises, more stories of how others have recovered and are getting along now. But the most important thing I’ve come to realise is that you don’t need more info you just need the right info - yours. No one is more ‘youer than you’ (& particularly as my brain sorcery makes my pain levels weird this seems to be talking to me most of all!) and workouts are really work it outs and that I can do. In fact that I gotta do. Just watch me! The comeback is always stronger than the setback!!
