Your rehab worked (that's the problem)

For three years I had good weeks.

I was studying kinesiology at the time. Learning how a body is supposed to move, in a student apartment, with a back that was getting worse while I read about it.

It started with one bad rep on the bench.

Then pain down my leg.

Then my foot started dragging when I walked.

So every good week felt like the end of it.

A week where nothing hurt. Where I’d warm up and think, this might be it, and actually mean it.

Then I’d load the bar.

Not always the first session. Sometimes the third.

Same spot. Same leg. Same thought.

I was better. What happened?

I had a lot of those weeks. Too many to count.

What I didn’t have was one week where I trained the way I wanted to and nothing came back.

That week never showed up.

Somewhere in year two, I stopped expecting it to.

That’s the part I don’t talk about much.

I was mad watching other people get better.

I still showed up to the gym every week. I just stopped lifting like someone who believed they’d get it back.

I wasn’t getting better.

I was feeling better, over and over, and treating them like they were the same thing.

They aren’t.

Feeling better is the pain settling down.

Getting better is being able to handle the training you actually want to get back to.

I had years of the first one.

I was studying this stuff. I should’ve known the difference.

I still couldn’t see it in myself.

And for a while, I couldn’t see it in the people I worked with either.

I sent clients back to training because they told me they felt better.

Some of them came back the same way I kept coming back.

Nobody was measuring the second one.

Not the people I saw.

Not me.

That’s what I look for now.

Before anything else.

Not whether it hurts.

Whether it holds.

Hope you're moving well and brewing better ☕️

Gabe