Injury

This blog is going to be a little more personal and probably long-winded—actually, definitely long-winded.

Since the gym is not about me—it's about our members and incredible coaches—I seldom write from personal experience and have even pared back the philosophical rambles a little. I’m told it scares off prospective members. However, this is going to be all about me, but hopefully, some of you will grab some insight from the experience.

If not, here's the TLDR: I ruptured my Achilles tendon playing soccer — one of the worst soft tissue injuries you can get. I’m taking the non-surgical route, which means a long, structured rehab process (likely 9–12 months), focused on progressive movement, strength, and eventually returning to sport.

This experience reminded me of the privilege of having a body that can move, the importance of community, and how injuries are opportunities to reassess and refocus. Recovery will be tough, but it’s not the end — it’s just a redirection. Movement got me into this, and movement will get me out. Injuries are never an excuse to stop moving! 

The Incident:

Let me set the scene: it’s the semi-finals of the Urban Soccer League. The opposition is very tough, but we are controlling possession and repelling attacks with ease. As Captain of Inter FC, I feel like I am leading the team well. All season I felt slow, but finally, things are coming off the way I feel like they should.

Ten minutes in and I’m on the ball. Just as I go to play the pass, I get kicked in the back of the leg with more power than I’ve ever felt. I dropped to the ground, calling out to the ref—couldn’t believe he didn’t blow the whistle.

“How is that not a foul?” I thought, as I turned around. I was met with an empty field. There was no one behind me. The shock of that and the pain was enough to get me to my feet, screaming in the choicest of French—the kind you can only learn if you grew up in the west of Ireland.

Despite the shock, I knew exactly what had happened.

I had ruptured my Achilles. There is only one type of outcome to those facts. The tendon creates your push-off—the power tendon. When it pops, it really fucking pops. It’s an explosion. So that sound and the feeling of being kicked with no one there is classic!

The Injury:

That’s what happened, so, what does it mean? There’s no sugar-coating an Achilles rupture. It is a long, long road to recovery. Probably 9 months to a year before I could think about playing again.

I have decided not to go with surgery. I often advise the people we work with to avoid surgery wherever possible. The research does not support it as having massively different outcomes for soft tissue injuries versus conservative therapies. The key has always been to allow the body to do its thing—allowing time and recovery to happen. Then, work really, really hard to build back up range of motion and strength in the affected area. When you look at the risk of complications with surgery versus the risk of reinjury if you don’t do surgery, there just isn’t enough compelling evidence for me to go under the knife. Besides, I really believe in the body’s incredible ability to heal itself and am excited to work closely with it to come back as strong as possible.

If movement got me into this problem, movement will get me out of it!

After meeting with a couple of very progressive surgeons, my decision was confirmed, and I will be taking the non-operative route.

This means 6–12 weeks in a boot to restrict range of motion and allow the tendon to heal, followed by months of training following basic progressive overload principles for range of motion, strength, and then power. Ironically, the exact same protocol if I did surgery ;)

The Insights:

“Never waste a good crisis,” they say—and injuries are no different. An incredible opportunity to reassess why it happened, what’s working, and what’s needed.

Privilege:

The first thing that comes to mind is privilege. The ability to even sustain this injury doesn’t escape me. How lucky am I to meet my friends and go to battle every week on a shitty field in Chinatown?

If you have a body that allows you to do what you love—biking, hiking, playing with your kids, gardening, or chasing a ball around with grown men in matching outfits—then you are incredibly lucky. You should be fighting with everything you have to maintain that ability. You owe it to everyone who lost theirs or never even had it.

The Contributing Factors in Health:

We talk about going to the gym, eating properly, and getting your sleep. All incredibly important aspects of health. But the research shows the two most influential factors in long-term health are relationships and finances.

I am so grateful that I have friends and community who were able to help me straight away—bringing me and waiting with me in ER, bringing me food and medicines, coming by to clean up my place while I am completely incapacitated, driving me to scans and doctor appointments.

We talk about maintaining health, but if you aren't maintaining relationships, you won’t survive. I always think of myself as a bit of a loner, but this truly proves “no man is an island”—nor should they strive to be.

The Fear:

Movement fear is real. This is one of those injuries that I am not sure I will ever fully come back from. I think in the back of my head, any time I go jump or sprint, I will hold back just a little bit. I’m not sure if it will ever be possible to fully express speed and power without a little voice in the back of my head.

I have experienced crippling injuries before, but there was always a belief that if I just got stronger, it would be ok. This will be a much longer road on the mental side, but it doesn’t mean I won’t try… remember, it’s all about slow exposure to more and more. Yes, PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD gawtdammit.

Why It Happened:

Achilles ruptures often happen to people playing short-burst power sports like soccer, tennis, or basketball. Over time the Achilles just gets worn down. It takes an incredible amount of stress if you’ve been playing sports for 35 years on it. Depending on your own morphology, there is a certain inevitability to it.

Like a lot of soft tissue injuries, there are not a lot of pre-symptoms. However, also like a lot of soft tissue injuries, whatever pre-symptoms were there, I was ignoring.

The reality is my body had been asking for a reset and redirection of my training. I was listening but kept putting it on the back burner. “Oh, once I reach X goal, or the season is over, I’ll shift my training to be more regenerative.” The reality is your body asks nicely first, then it raises its voice, and finally it starts screaming. Listen to it when it’s asking nicely—that’s when you still have some say in the direction you can go.

Other, more subtle variables also existed. The heat was so bad I didn’t sleep the night before. I was probably dehydrated. I usually cycle to the games—this time I didn’t. Did that affect my warm-up?

Injuries, like all accidents, never happen in vacuums. Although there was an element of inevitability to this, these are all reminders of the holistic element to training and movement.

The Recovery:

This might be where I am a little weird, but I am really excited for the recovery. This gives me incredible focus along with a great opportunity for experimentation along the way.
My plan is to take 10 days to 2 weeks with very, very little movement and no training. This allows the inflammatory healing process to take hold without redirecting any of my body’s resources away from healing. I don’t need to be recovering from induced stress while I have some damn tendon to grow.

Following this short period of immobility, I’ll start training my unaffected areas. This is what I am excited by. I will get to train like a bodybuilder using machines and lighter dumbbells—mainly so as to not have any opportunity to accidentally load the untrained leg.

This will be coupled with relatively aggressive training on my good leg. The goal here is to make sure I don’t lose strength on the good leg and to take advantage of something called the cross-training effect. This is a proven mechanism of maintaining muscle and strength on the injured leg even without training it. The theory is that the nervous system retains some of that information and neural pathways.

The final part of this phase of the recovery and training will be to introduce light movements to the injured leg. This means taking the boot off for short periods and, with extreme caution, bringing the injured ankle through ranges of motion that slowly increase week to week.

The goal of this first section is to make sure that my localized injury doesn’t turn into a global weakness. Being injured is not an excuse to stop training. It is arguably the worst thing you can do.

Phase 2 will be in 6–12 weeks. This is the transition phase from the boot to walking again. We will do another scan to see if the tendon has healed and, if so, the transition starts.

Now we will start strengthening those ranges of motion we built in phase one. There will be a huge amount of work on building back up strength in the leg that hasn’t been used for so long with isolated work. And then, conservatively, introduce fully integrated movements back into training. This means full-body movements that don’t train muscles in isolation but in a coordinated, multi-joint fashion.

The main goals for this phase are to regain strength in the legs—especially the calf—and relearn how to walk without compensation. I am expecting my hips to be pretty screwed up after months in a boot.

Once I hit certain metrics, I can look to graduate to the next phase. I have no expectations of time in this phase, but it could be 6 months.

Phase 3 will be to reintroduce impact. This means getting used to generating and absorbing speed through the joints and tendons. I will start with very small movements that focus more on absorbing rather than generating, as the Achilles’ main function is power generation. Then slowly graduate to producing force.

In this phase, I will build up to running in a straight line, sprinting, jumping, and hopping in very controlled circumstances. Once I have reached these metrics, I will graduate to phase 4. Again, I have no timeframe on this, but I’m imagining 3 months.

Phase 4 will be a return to sport. This means doing all of the actions above but in an uncontrolled manner. The main variables that will be in my control here are time spent in the activity and working to minimize the speed and randomness of the sport. I’ll do this by returning to sports training on my own first before the unpredictability of other humans gets thrown into the mix. This phase is really about building up the mental strength to get back into competitive sport. Maybe another 3 months, but honestly, who knows.

So there it is—a catastrophic injury and a fun little plan to get back to normal. I understand that not everyone is going to be like me and look at injuries with the same excitement. However, the alternative is pretty shit. I can sit around and cry about why it happened, I can feel helpless and passive in my recovery. But fuck that. With everything that is going on in the world, I am not going to feel sorry about some little injury I got as a grown man playing football.

Ultimately, it is always more fun to focus on what we can do and not on what we can’t. That is the whole ethos of Uptown Movement. We always find a progression or regression and find a beauty and mastery in where we are, that’s what gets us to where we want to be…

PS

We went on to not only win that semi final…but also the final!