As I entered the final frustrating stages of injury rehab this week, I realised another potential pitfall I haven’t covered.
I’m not sprinting yet, but I’ve reintroduced jumps. I’m running short distances, and am back to my pre-injury intensity and volume of training otherwise— and with rehab drills included, even more so.
The injury is front of mind only because I make it so, but in day-to-day life—the absence of jujits and sprinting excepted— everything is as it should be.
But something is still off.
The idea of paying attention is central to all Leftfield Training, and it’s obviously just as important throughout the recovery process —alignment, sensation, control— but here, uniquely, we risk turning that strength into self-sabotage.
And as an artefact of listening to your body, this is more likely from following this Leftfield approach—a distortion or side-effect caused by the observation itself.
Which is no vote of confidence for the alternative near-universal ‘rest-resume’ method. Skipping over movement, whether deeply attended or otherwise, may sidestep this particular snare, but only by virtually guaranteeing reinjury or compensatory complications down the track.
Nevertheless, awareness is a tool. And like any tool…
THE CENTIPEDE’S DILEMMA
A centipede was happy – quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
Thinking about how you do something can make you worse at it. In sports psychology, it’s called reinvestment theory — the skill breakdown under pressure known in golf as the yips, in sport more broadly as a choke.
If you’ve never experienced it yourself, try walking across the room while paying careful attention to how you're doing it.
If you’re doing it right— which is to say doing it wrong—you’ll notice a hesitation, a loss of fluidity. At the very least, a degree of tension.
A wholly unnecessary tension. A once finely tuned orchestra threatening to devolve into a rabble of disparate parts. And all because some clown starts waving a baton around.
Not what you want with a 3-ft putt to close out The Masters.
And not what you want coming back from injury.
At first, awareness is everything. You need to feel it. Notice how you’re compensating. Adjust your movement and back off when it hurts. When the injury stops hurting, it’s important to keep it front of mind long enough to avoid unconscious re-injury. All of this is a skill.
But when it’s late in the piece, and as described, when most things are back to normal—that persistence of something not-quite-right may be a signal your awareness has overstayed its welcome.
Even when you’ve become confident with structured exercise, you can still be shying from other seemingly innocuous daily movements. Walking around the block invites a broader range of unanticipated movement permutations (and corresponding uncertainty) compared to the predictability of any single, even heavily loaded exercise.
So you adjust your posture, stiffen your gait or otherwise subtly shift your weight to protect the injury site. In often barely perceptible ways, you guard.
The freestyle variability of sport will solve this— both through an unpredictability of movement but, arguably more importantly, by occupying your attention. But that’s probably not where you want to start. Certainly not with any collision or martial sport.
In the same graduated manner you introduce any other movement, you must further manage the reintroduction of chaos.
I do it by chasing the dog. And vice versa. Sans canine, you could track a footy or any other irregularly moving object, building speed until you have confidence in any change in direction. And then have a game of tennis or any other sport where you’re not going to get cleaned up by somebody, that makes you move without thinking about it.
But in all these instances, be certain that the same unconscious movement demanded by sport translates back into daily life, when you could otherwise be thinking about it. Overthinking it.
You’ll never return to flow if you can’t get out of your own way, but if you’re tracking every tweak and twinge, that is the least of your worries.
If you think a centipede in a ditch has problems, try one with a sore toe.
There’s no such thing as a pain stimulus. Nothing has the property of pain. It’s an emergent property of the human.
Lorimer Mosley
Throughout this process, I’ve advocated working around pain. Somewhat paradoxically, I have further suggested that moving into some discomfort — a 3/10 on the pain scale— is also helpful.
But what I don’t ever mean is ‘checking’ pain, or ‘testing’ it.
And I see this all the time: the pulled muscle that you stretch into every 15 minutes just to see if it’s still there.
It is.
And given those muscle fibres that are trying to knit are being repeatedly teased apart by your need to know, it will be there a good while longer.
Or the classic demonstration:
What did you do?
I hurt my back, and now it hurts when I do this
[They do this. And, sure enough, it hurts.]
And I do this:
[facepalm]
But this isn’t just picking a scab. Like anything—handwriting, deadlifts or dancing— you get better at what you practice. Repeating this pain-check loop only strengthens the neural pathway. You’re not just feeling pain anymore; you’re rehearsing it. Training it.
Moreover, as Lorimer Mosley points to above, our nociceptors — the specialised sensory nerve endings that detect potentially damaging stimuli, alerting the body to the threat of injury— are not (pain) receptors but danger detectors and the brain interprets these signals, considering context, emotions, and past experiences, to produce the sensation of pain.
So pain is less a sign of anything being wrong than it is of you perceiving—or expecting— something to be wrong.
Less about stimulus and all about meaning, and when the very act of looking implies danger, if you go looking for pain, especially repeatedly, there’s a good chance you’ll find it. Like a microphone pointed next to its own speaker causing feedback—the nervous system reacts to the act of paying attention itself.
Then the trouble will not be finding it, but losing it.
Because pain can become the worst of habits.
The trick is balance. We want awareness without obsession. Attention without tension. Precision without paralysis.
Injury invites— and warrants— attention. At first, that’s a good thing—essential even. We need to feel what's happening, make adjustments, and learn from the body’s signals. But there comes a point, often subtle and easy to miss, when that attention slips into hypervigilance. And now the very thing that helped us heal is keeping us stuck. Or worse.
Controlled training has its place, but, eventually, recovery calls for chaos—Think: games, reaction drills, or chasing a ball or a dog. Not just because it challenges the body, but because it redirects your attention outward— the antidote to overthinking, and getting you out of your own way.
Move with awareness to rebuild trust. And then, do just that: trust.
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Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI