Contact drills during injury rehabilitation

Whilst easy to miss during rehab, it is important to expose athletes to controlled contact drills to maintrain strength and confidence.

Done well, controlled contact drills can double as conditioning!⁣ For example wrestling in kneeling can be performed with short intervals (10-15 seconds on, 15 – 30 seconds off).

As rehab run intensity and difficulty increases corresponding and incremental increases also occur with contact drills.

Offence, defence, expected and unexpected contact all get thrown in the mix.

Take a look at the video below for just a few ideas on how to progress contact drills during the return to play process.

This video highlights ideas that could be gradually progressed whilst recovering from an ankle injury or surgery, but the order and intensity of the exercises can be easily manipulated to suit other injuries such as knee MCL sprains, ACL reconstruction,  or bone stress fractures.