How long does it take to recover physically and psychologically after an injury?

Introduction: When soccer players sustain an injury, they generally have to recover, both physically and psychologically. The process of recovery after an adversity such as an injury can be defined as resilience.1 Despite its importance, individual resilience after a time-loss injury has never been quantified before.

Purpose: This study aimed to quantify resilience in terms of both physical and psychological variables after time-loss injury in individual soccer players.

Method: We followed 58 elite youth soccer players who sustained time-loss injuries during the 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 seasons. For each individual, we monitored the training load, perceived recovery, motivation, self-efficacy, mood, and enjoyment for every training and match day. We quantified resilience using these variables following injury by fitting multiple growth models. Next, we identified the best one using the Bayesian information criterion.2 Then we used the predicted values from the selected model to identify the time point at which the physical and psychological variables should return to baseline levels.

Results: 25 of the 58 soccer players experienced a significant drop in physical or psychological variables following an injury. For three soccer players, the psychological variables self-efficacy and mood did not return to baseline levels even though these players resumed training. Accordingly, the average duration between the day of the injury and the predicted day of return to baseline was lower for the physical variables (training load = 20.5 days and recovery = 73.5 days) than for the psychological variables (motivation = 358 days, self-efficacy = 114.8 days, mood = 104.4, and enjoyment = 70.25 days). However, these trajectories were highly individual-specific.

Conclusions: Injuries often lead to a significant decrease in the physical and psychological variables of soccer players. Although the recovery trajectory after an injury is highly individual-specific, the recovery of psychological variables often requires more time than the recovery of physical variables. Practitioners can use these findings during the multidisciplinary and personalized rehabilitation of injured players.