Two Sides Of Rehabilitating An Athlete

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There are two sides to fully and properly rehabilitating an athlete. The first side is assisting the athletes’ psychological and mental state. The other is dealing with the athletes’ lack of confident and denial. The more serious the injury, the harder it is for the athlete to cope with the intense physiologic emotions. Every athlete goes through a range of emotions, scaling of intensity in coherence to the injury. The athlete tends to develop a potential loss of primary coping mechanism, which is lack of sport involvement and physical activity. In result of all the intense emotions, it makes it that much harder to cope with it and it also creates more stress and anxiety for the injured athlete. While rehabilitation the injured athlete feels helpless, and hopeless, resulting in an overall change in behavior. Injured athletes are more likely to stress, they lose their motivation and drive, and also become heavily …show more content…
Because athletes are so engaged in their sport they tend to overlook the injuries, and try to lie to themselves and their peers, that they are okay. “In addition to the physical pain of an injury, athletes struggle psychologically, however little is known about their emotional response, recovery, and need for social support.” ( ) The first step in rehabilitating a physically and emotionally injured athlete is to have to understand how the athlete is feeling. Keeping in mind that so much of the athletes’ life had revolved around playing the sport and all of a sudden, it has been taken away from them. In usual cases athletes have lots of anger, depression, and loss of confidence. After a traumatic injury, defining “back to 100 percent” is completely up to the athlete themselves. Also having coaches, teammates, scouts etc. expecting a full recovery in a small amount of time, adds to the intense raging emotions. “Athletes must heal on all levels, not just the physical.”(