How to Get Back to the Activity You Love After Surgery
Updated: Oct 16
I would start to get nervous before anything had even happened.
There was a Sunday morning yoga class that I went to for years. Same room, same teacher, same spot by the window where the light came in.
I hadn’t been in almost a year. My hip had been hurting long before I had surgery.
Three months after surgery, the hip was repaired, cleaned up, and signed off by the surgeon. My PT ran me through the tests and told me I was cleared. By every measure, I could go back to yoga.
Then Sunday came. I made my tea and 10 minutes before the class started I was still standing in the kitchen, feeling my anxiety build. My thoughts ran wild like a cheetah chasing a gazelle. Am I recovered enough to last a full hour? What happens the first time we move into pigeon pose and there’s a stretch and strain on that hip? What if I do something careless and get injured again? How am I going to sit cross-legged on the floor? In yoga this is called easy pose, a name clearly chosen by somebody who had never met my hip.
It was my seventh surgery recovery, and I was still nervous to show up again.
I didn't go. Not that Sunday, and not for a handful of Sundays after it.
It took me almost five months to get back in that room. By then I could do nearly everything else I wanted to do, which is what made it strange. My Sunday mornings still had a hole in them, and I was the only thing standing in the way.
If you've had surgery and you're back to work, doing stairs, and making grocery runs, chances are there's still one thing you haven't gone back to. Maybe your running shoes are still by the back door, laces tied from the last time you wore them. Or maybe you've driven past the pool, the court, or the trailhead and kept going, because today didn't feel like the day either.
What got me back is what I want you to have.
This gets researched and written about. Just not for us.
Search around and you'll find plenty on it. Fear of going back after an injury is practically its own field of study. Almost all of it is written for the 24 year old with a torn ACL and a season to get back to. Return-to-play testing, sports psychologists, coaches, timelines.
Very little of it is written for the 44 year old who wants her Saturday trail walk back. Or the person who hasn't opened the garage to get their bike out. Or me, holding a tea cup on a Sunday, not going to class.
The fear is the same size, whether you’re 24, 44, or 64, a college athlete or a Sunday regular. What's missing is somebody who can talk to the rest of us who aren't elite athletes. Yup, that's exactly what I do now.
What we're actually after
The goal is simple to say out loud. I want to get back to the activity I love.
Underneath it is a bigger idea, which is learning to trust your body again. Those two travel together. You don't really get one without the other.
The stakes are higher than they sound. That thing you love isn't a hobby you can swap out for something different. Your friendships may live in that group or team. Sleep is tangled up in it, along with your mood, and your sense of yourself as somebody who can move. Losing it for a season is expected after surgery.
Losing it permanently is a different kind of loss, and it happens to a lot of people. If you're reading this, you already know which activity this means for you.
You are not being dramatic about this, and the numbers are clear.
A group at a sports surgery clinic in Ireland looked at people two years out from ACL surgery and asked the ones who hadn't gone back to their sport why. Fear of reinjury came first, at 27.5 percent. Lack of confidence in how they'd perform came second, at 19.4 percent. Together, nearly half. Ongoing knee pain accounted for 10 percent (Toale et al., 2021).
For every person who stayed out because of pain, roughly five stayed out because of fear.
An earlier Swedish study found the same thing from another angle. About half the patients got back to their pre-injury activity level, and the ones who didn't scored higher on fear of movement (Kvist et al., 2005).
Neither of those studies is about a Sunday yoga class. They're about knees and sports. The pattern underneath transfers, though, and I've watched it in myself and in the people I see. Bodies get cleared long before people feel ready, and no one on your care team is watching for the second one. That's not a knock on them. It isn't what they're there for.
Three things can get you back to that activity you love: a record of small wins to keep your memory honest, small steps that are almost boring, and a better way of reading what your body tells you after each step.
Let's take them one at a time.
1. Keep a record of small wins
Most people come out of surgery with exactly one thing they measure: pain. Nobody wrote down a baseline for sleep, energy, mood, range, or confidence. When pain is your only measurement, one rough day can convince you that you're going backward.
The correction isn’t glamorous. Write down small, specific, concrete things every day. Skip "felt okay." Write something closer to "walked to the mailbox and back without stopping," or "slept four hours before the pain woke me up," or "tied my own shoes."
It has to be specific enough that you can't argue with it three weeks later.
Why this works: our brains are trained to look for the negative. This is helpful if you’re trying to remember which plant is poisonous or what animal might attack you, but it’s less helpful when you’re living in a post-surgery world and your brain needs some steady feedback. Chances are if you look back at the last few weeks, your brain and nervous system will easily recall things like the time your cat threw up on your favorite shoes or the first two painful weeks after surgery. We remember the emotionally-laden, hard times and forget the average days.
That isn't a character flaw. Instead, thank your ancestors. By writing down 1-3 concrete things each day, you have a written record. And in a month, you’ll look back and see that four weeks ago you couldn’t get dressed on your own, make your own dinner, or pick up the laundry basket. Now you can.
2. Make the steps smaller than feels reasonable
This is where most people go wrong, and I include myself in that.
Graded exposure means breaking the thing into pieces so small that you can’t fail, repeating a piece until it's boring, then going up one notch.
For my yoga class, walking in and rolling out my mat was nowhere near the first rung. The first rung was driving there and sitting in the parking lot for ten minutes. (Yes, really. Sitting in the car counts. Nobody has to know.) After that, sitting at the back of class to watch. Next, talking to the teacher before class. Then going and skipping every pose that stretches the joint. Later, one modified lunge.
The rule that makes it work: the step should feel almost too easy. If you have to convince yourself, or psych yourself up for it, it's too big.
A body learns that something is safe through repetition, not through a pep talk or a date on the calendar. Big jumps produce big evidence in both directions, and somebody who's already scared can't afford a bad result. One rough day at the wrong rung can cost six months.
This is also the part where I would want a second opinion. Left alone, people pick a rung that's too high almost every time. I do it, too. In my Surgery Recovery & Reset program, we build your ladder together on our calls, starting a rung lower than you'd pick for yourself. Each week you send me a quick email check-in, and I write back with what I'm seeing and whether it's time to go up a rung or stay put a little longer.
3. Read the signals without calling every one of them damage
After surgery, you start interpreting everything your body does. Soreness means something tore. Stiffness means it isn't working. A twinge after 40 minutes means stop, go home, and start researching whether the surgery failed.
The interpretation does more harm than the sensation.
What to practice instead: notice the signal, describe it in ordinary and objective words, like you were describing a cloud shape to a friend. Ask yourself two things. Is this new, or is it familiar? And is it getting worse, or holding steady?
Then let the answer be information, without judgment.
This is the one people skip, and it's the one that matters most. You can do the exposure step perfectly and then spend the whole evening scanning your hip for proof that you ruined it. Your body learns from those hours too. The step teaches your body that there’s safety. Afterward, the hours you spend checking on it teach your nervous system that it needs to stay alert.
Here's my own version. After my first class back, my hip ached that evening. The old me would have called that a setback and stayed home for two more weeks. Instead I wrote it down, described it plainly (dull, spread out, familiar, gone by morning), and compared it against the notes from the week before. Ordinary soreness from doing a thing. The ache showed up either way. What I did with it was up to me. Go me!
That sorting is hard to do by yourself, because the person doing the sorting is the same person who might still be anxious or afraid. That's why my Surgery Recovery & Reset program includes three Rough-Patch check-ins. When something flares and your brain starts writing the worst-case story, you can book a 15-minute call or send me a text or voicemail. I'll get back to you within one business day, with a second read from someone who knows exactly what that spike feels like and isn't inside this one.
You might be wondering: what if something really is wrong?
Fair question, and it deserves a straight answer.
None of this means ignoring pain. There's a line, and it's worth saying clearly. Anything new, anything sharp, and anything that keeps getting worse over several days goes to your care team. That part isn't up for interpretation, and no amount of reframing substitutes for an actual evaluation.
What sits underneath the question is harder. Most people come out of surgery having lost the ability to tell a warning apart from a memory. Both land in the body the same way. Getting that sorting ability back is most of the work here, and almost nobody does it alone.
How I finally got back in that room
I stopped aiming for my regular place in the class.
I told myself I was in this for the long haul, that I didn't have to arrive anywhere on a particular Sunday, and that all I had to do was show up and do whatever my hip was ready for that day.
Then I did the thing I should have done months earlier. I talked to the teacher before class. Told her what my hip could and couldn't do. Asked for the modifications I'd need.
I modified the heck out of half that class. Pigeon never happened. And I made it through, in my spot by the window, and I could not have been prouder of myself.
I kept going back.
Nothing about that morning was brave or heroic. It was one small step, and small is what finally worked.
Pulling it together
Being cleared and feeling ready are two different points on the calendar, and nobody prepares you for the second one.
Keep a written record of small wins, so your memory doesn't distort what happened. Take steps so small they feel almost boring. After each one, read what your body tells you in plain words, without calling it damage.
Start this week with one line in a notebook and one rung so low it makes you laugh a little.
The thing you love is still there. The trail, the class, the court, the water. One morning you might set your bag down in your old spot and realize, halfway through, that you forgot to be nervous. Getting there takes longer than anybody promised you. It's also more possible than it feels ten minutes before class, with your tea going cold in the kitchen.
If everybody says you're fine and you still haven't gone back
None of that is complicated to understand. All of it is hard to do alone, at the exact moment you're most likely to talk yourself out of it.
That's why I build Surgery Recovery & Reset. It's eight weeks of 1:1 coaching for folks who've been cleared after orthopedic surgery and still haven't gotten back to the thing they love. You get three 60-minute calls with me, so you have someone helping you plan the next rung. Weekly email check-ins mean you're not guessing on your own between calls. And three Rough-Patch check-ins cover the days a twinge turns into a 9 pm spiral.
The first step is a free call. It's short. We get a quick read on where you're stuck, you leave with one next step you can take this week, and we both find out whether Surgery Recovery & Reset is a good fit. If it isn't, I'll tell you.
Book your free call here: https://www.turnstonewellness.com/contact
I look forward to talking with you soon.
References
Kvist, J., Ek, A., Sporrstedt, K., & Good, L. (2005). Fear of re-injury: A hindrance for returning to sports after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy, 13(5), 393–397. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00167-004-0591-8
Toale, J. P., Hurley, E. T., Hughes, A. J., Withers, D., King, E., Jackson, M., & Moran, R. (2021). The majority of athletes fail to return to play following anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction due to reasons other than the operated knee. Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy, 29(11), 3877–3882. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00167-020-06407-5
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