Rehab drills have no opponent in them

The exercises get harder every week and stay entirely predictable, then the athlete returns to chaos.

By week nine the progression looks impressive. Heavier, faster, more complex, ticked off in order. And every single repetition has been performed at a moment the athlete chose, in a direction they knew about, with nothing moving except them. The sport contains none of those conditions.

Injuries in team sport happen inside a mess. Somebody arrives late, the ball bounces wrong, a foot lands where a foot was not meant to be, and the athlete has to solve a problem they did not see coming in a fraction of a second. A rehabilitation programme built entirely from self paced exercises trains the body and skips the part that broke it.

I want to be fair to the physios here, because the early stages have to be controlled and the criteria based approach is a genuine improvement on the old vibes based one. The gap is not knowledge, it is handover. The coach is the person who knows what chaos looks like in that sport and the coach is usually not in the room. So the final stage of rehab, which should be the most sport specific work anybody does all year, ends up being conducted by whoever is free, in a corner of the gym, with cones.

Adding unpredictability is not expensive. Put a second person in the drill who moves when they like. Make the athlete react to a call rather than a count. Have them arrive at the movement from a position they did not plan. Put a ball in it, because a ball takes the eyes off the limb, and an athlete watching their own knee is not doing the task the sport will ask for.

The other missing element is other people's bodies. Contact, jostling, being off balance because somebody leaned on you. Nobody wants to reintroduce that too early and nobody has a neat protocol for it either, so it tends to be reintroduced on the first day back in full training, which is the worst possible place to find out.

Progressing load without progressing chaos gives you an athlete who is strong in laboratory conditions. That is a real achievement and it is not the same as being ready, and the day everybody discovers the difference tends to be a Tuesday in full contact.