Stay Positive Part 2

Hey guys! So last time I gave you a couple tips on how to stay positive and motivated through injuries and negative times! For the second part of this series I decided that showing you how I keep track of my progress, making sure I stay on track and how I prevent laziness. Hopefully this helps you guys!

So, how I keep track of my progress is by using sheets that I have created online and print out. I fill these out every day and every Monday I have a separate sheet that summarizes the previous week's progress reports. I find that these have helped me to communicate properly with my coaches, doctor and physical therapist about where my pain is, when the pain occurs and what type of pain it is. I can also take notes and write any questions I think of while filling out my sheet for the day. This takes up about ten or fifteen minutes of my day and it is definitely worth it. I found that last year, before developing this system, I was unprepared when speaking with my coaches. This made it extremely hard to differentiate between what I could and couldn't do and left me weak during the season. Overall I put myself in a bad place and by writing this I hope to prevent any of my readers from doing the same.

Another thing I want to prevent all of you from doing is getting off track. I found that coming back from injury took up a lot of my time and some days it didn't feel like it was worth it to bother putting in the work. When I got into this mind frame I went backwards in my progress.

a photo of Lindsey Vonn, an olympic skier who has had
multiple injuries and come back stronger from every one
photo courtesy of Ten Sports Club

As I got weaker, things started to hurt my knee more and more limiting what I could do. There was a time period when my doctor thought I was pushing my leg too hard and creating pain when I actually needed to do more strengthening. It was a bad time that left me weak as I mentioned before. I had to work ten times harder because I was expected to do a lot more and keep up with my team. It is SOOO IMPORTANT to stay motivated and keep yourself together. Injury is a hard mental game to play and beat. Sometimes you think you know better and that you don't need to put in the work, but you do. Remember this little rant when you aren't feeling motivated and think about re-injuring yourself like I did. It's unfortunate that it has taken me two surgeries to figure all this out but you can learn from my mistakes. This also leads into preventing laziness.

There are some days you just don't want to do anything. However, I have actually read an article that stated the the best days to go to the gym are the days when you don't want to. Some people say your body gets the most out of your workout on those days. How do you get yourself there? This is when these two posts come full circle. The answer to preventing laziness is staying positive and motivated. Sound familiar right? Here's some more information on how to prevent laziness. 

Overall it's hard to get over the bad days. If you haven't read part one of this mini series go do that for some more tips and tricks. Stay strong and follow the steps I've listed to take a more mature approach to your injury or bad attitude and you will be fine! Hopefully this has helped any of you that have had problems staying committed and motivated to your sport recently. Stay tough! See you soon!