Discharged with a sheet of exercises? Here's what's actually missing

Your body is lazy, it's the reason your ancestors survived.

Go back far enough (annoyingly, not that far) and we were hunter-gatherers. No movement, no food. No food, no survival. So the body learned to be ruthlessly efficient: never spend energy you don't have to, never load a tissue you can get away with not loading. That instinct is still wired into you today.

Which is exactly why the sheet of exercises you got handed on the way out of hospital isn't going to get you back to sport.

Your body will always take the easy road

Post-op, your body does what it's always done — it picks the path of least resistance. The brain chooses the easiest way to move, every single time. And the easiest way is almost never through the joint you've just had operated on. It's around it.

So it protects the repaired, donor or injured tissue by quietly doing less with it. It finds a workaround. And it's brilliant at hiding that workaround from you.

You think you're lifting your arm when you're actually shrugging your shoulder to cheat it up. You think you're moving your ankle when walking you're actually hiking your hip to make up for the range that isn't there and thats why your back hurts. It feels like progress. It looks like progress. It isn't.

"Heal" and "adapt" are not the same word

Here's the bit no one tells you on discharge day.

If you do your exercises wrong, going through the motions, letting the body compensate, the injured tissue will heal, but it won't adapt. It knits back together, but it never gets stronger. It never learns to handle the load that sport is going to throw at it.

And tissue that's healed but not adapted is tissue that's waiting to go again. So you get re-injured. More time off. More frustration. Back to square one, wondering why you "did everything you were told."

This is why I'm pro-movement and anti-exercise-sheet. There's a world of difference between doing your physio and doing your physio. Same exercises on paper, completely different outcome.

Doing it properly means loading what we actually want to load

Proper rehab isn't a list of movements. It's intention. It's loading the exact tissue we want to load, strengthening the range we actually need, and refusing to let the body cheat its way around the hard bit. Not staging around going through reps — making every rep count toward the joint that needs it.

Get that right early and the compensations never take hold. Get it wrong, and they show up months later in the late stages of rehab, right when you're trying to get back to sport, and set you back to the start.

Why this keeps happening

None of this is a dig at NHS physios. They're good at their jobs and stretched beyond belief. The problem is the system: it's built to get you out of pain and back to daily life, on a handful of appointments spaced weeks apart. It was never set up to rehab an athlete with the care and attention it takes to actually return you to sport, stronger than before, not just functional.

That gap — between being discharged and being genuinely ready to compete again, is the whole reason I do this.

So if you're sat there with a sheet of exercises…

You're not behind, and you've not done anything wrong. You've just been given half of what you need. The other half is a plan that loads the right tissue, in the right range, with someone watching closely enough to stop your body cheating.