Return to Play

An athlete you work with has had an injury, what next? How do you approach return to performance? Planning is of the utmost importance in a return to performance. From goal setting, to laying expectations and establishing objective criteria the planning done in the initial stages of a rehabilitation will help set out a map for the collaborative team involved. This module discusses the return to sport continuum, and in particular the process of goal setting, criteria building, and establishing a framework for return to performance.

Before an athlete returns to performance, they must first return to activities of daily living. For athletes, activities of daily living aren’t just transfers, dressing, and bathing, but the fundamental activities involved in sport such as squatting, running, and jumping. Returning to running, in particular, requires gradual progression including initial pre-running activities all the way to a return to sprinting. This module discusses the early acute/sub-acute phases of rehabilitation within the context of a return to performance and then recommendations for how to build objective criteria and return to running into rehabilitation.

Sport demands strength, therefore, regardless of sport a rehabilitation must consider the demands an athlete will face and make sure that they are prepared. This module reviews how to establish what the demands of sport are and recommendations on considerations for objective strength criteria. Further, this module discusses different types of strength, and the importance of attention to periodisation and programmatically building strength within a rehabilitation.

How an athlete moves can determine their success as well as make them unique. After injury, movement patterns are disrupted, requiring rehabilitation to include movement re-training. Incorporating principles of motor learning may help ensure that movements remain unconscious and facilitate a faster return to performance. This module reviews principles of motor learning and encourages clinicians to think more creatively about how they build movement training for their athletes. In particular this module encourages integrating decision-making, cognitive demand, and perturbation into more exercises and earlier in rehabilitation.

Return to performance may be the hardest portion of the return to sport continuum. In a team environment the athlete is back competing and in a clinic environment often the athlete has already been discharged. Regardless of these challenges, if return to pre-injury level of performance was the athlete’s goal, it is important that a return to performance is achieved. This module discusses how to track an athlete’s return to performance using monitoring and key performance indicators. The module also discusses aspects of rehabilitation that may be overlooked such as psychological readiness and the impact of technical and tactical training.