01/21/2025
Rehabilitation vs. Reconditioning: What’s the Difference?
Traditional rehab often focuses on the specific injury—and does not take into account the whole athlete. Rehab is often guided by tissue healing timelines and returns athletes to sport once “biological healing” has occurred.
Reconditioning takes a performance-driven approach to recovery, prioritizing the entire athlete. Being able to train in the presence of injury allows the athlete to build sport specific demands while also recovering from injury. A criterion based approach guides the reconditioning process to allow the athlete to build a hierarchy of athletic performance attributes to return to competition.
💡 Key takeaways from the post:
✅ Don’t just rehab the injury—train the whole athlete.
✅ Recovery is a preparation period for competition, not just downtime.
✅ Reverse-engineer success: Start with the end goal and build backward.
✅ Train around the injury
