Tips on managing injury in athletes

Being injured is rarely an easy, or pleasant, time for athletes. They cannot complete skills they have previously been well capable of, and as a consequence, negative thinking often dominates the minds of such individuals.

The psychology literature offers two perspectives to explain athletes’ reactions to injury, namely the Grief model, and the Cognitive Appraisal Model. In the Grief model, injury reaction is explained as a series of stages an athlete goes through when injured. These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.

Many athletes and, indeed, their coaches, parents, teammates and friends may recognise such stages in injured athletes. However, in recent years, the Grief model’s explanation of injury response in athletes has been somewhat replaced by the Cognitive Appraisal Model (CAM). The CAM focuses on how athletes view their injuries, their impact and consequences, as key factors in determining how they react to those injuries. Regardless of which model you support, a number of negative reactions to injury have been identified in injured athletes. These include negative thinking, feeling ‘down’, or even depressed, low motivations levels, anger, frustration, aggression on occasion, non-compliance with treatment programmes, anxiety, and fear of re-injury upon returning to training, to name but a few. So, as an injured athlete, or as a coach, or friend of such athletes, what can you do to cope with, or help your friend / athlete to cope with an injury?

1. Keep the athlete involved in the sport / with the team, as much as possible. If they have limited ability to participate in physical / contact sessions, have them act as another ‘coach’ to perhaps younger players in their club or team. They could also help the video analyst assess matches, and deliver the results to the team on areas of strength, and areas for improvement. Such tasks may have the added advantage of developing other skills in injured athletes, such as leadership, presentation or communication skills. Often injured athletes, who remain involved by filling such roles become more tactically aware and mature. Such traits are often of benefit to the team, and to the athletes’ performances, when they return to their sport, following their period of injury.

2. Offer support, and encouragement, to the player. If you are the coach/parent/partner of the athlete, you can show that you remain interested in helping the injured athlete. Enquire about the injury. If they seems ‘down’, or ‘out of sorts’, try to encourage them to discuss how they are feeling with you. Listen to how they say they feel, without any judgement or interruption, from you. Then try to reassure them that such feelings are not a sign of weakness, or make them very different from others in similar positions. See what you can do to help them. Often, injured athletes feel isolated, or ‘left out’, of their team. They may also fear they will not, ‘get back into the team’ when they have recovered, or return to their pre-injury level of performance. Reassure them that regardless of the rehabilitation outcome, they are valued individuals with many talents, and will have lots of different opportunities for success in the future no matter what the injury outcome. Encourage them to seek professional help, if their concerns or worries seem abnormal to you, or seem to be over-whelming them.

3. Boredom can also be a problem for injured athletes, so perhaps encourage injured individuals to seek out positive mental stimulation, perhaps in the form of a course of study. Plenty of options are available in the form of night courses, which athletes can enrol on and which may not impact on their rehabilitation or training schedules. For example, part-time courses such as my Special Purpose Award, Level 8, Certificate in Sport Psychology in IADT, Dun Laoghaire, might interest them.

4. A forth tip is to remind injured athletes to use their SMART/SCAMP goal setting principles (see my previous piece on a Lust for Life about Goal Setting) to help them proceed through the rehabilitation period. They should set targets throughout the recovery process similar to the goals they would set if they were competing, and striving to improve their skills, as fully fit athletes. They could also use the additional enforced time away from their sport to mentally rehearse their skills so that these skills are more ‘accessible’ to them when they return to training. It is important not to let the neural ‘skill pathways’, from the brain to the body, become ‘overgrown’ during the rehabilitation period. This is where mental imagery can be practiced, and may benefit the athlete’s return-from-injury form.

5. ‘Buddy up’ injured players with others who have suffered similar injuries in the past, so that they have someone else to talk about how they are feeling. Such ‘buddies’ are typically able to understand the feelings, and thoughts, the injured athletes are experiencing, because they too may have travelled a similar path. They can provide important nuggets of information to the injured athletes about how to cope with their injury time (i.e., what worked to help them get back to full fitness, and indeed what they would do differently, if they had that time to do over again; in other words, what lessons did they learn from their injury experiences).

To conclude, injury (or indeed any illness) is often difficult for individuals to cope with. Above are just a five practical tips for what you might be able to do to help yourself, or your players, partners, friends etc. to cope with this, often very difficult, time in a sporting life. There are no doubt other strategies that could help such injured athletes. Practical Sport Psychology texts, such as ‘Pure Sport’ by John Kremer and Aidan Moran (2013) could be of benefit to you also, if you wish to read up on more practical tips for coping with such an issue. But from me, best wishes, in life, and in sport/your rehabilitation, to you all.