“Can’t Ever” vs. “Can’t Yet”

When you're dealing with pain or injury—whether you're an athlete or someone simply trying to live a healthy life—your world often shrinks. The number of activities, movements, and lifts available to you becomes limited. To fully rehab, it's often necessary to temporarily step away from certain activities to facilitate healing.

This kind of activity modification is essential to the healing process. At that particular time and place, your body and tissues may not be tolerant of the stressors those activities impose. Including them in your rehab plan would be counterproductive.

After a period of rest and modification, you begin to feel better. It’s common to associate that improvement with being “healed.” Then comes the test: you try the once-irritating movement again, only to find that it still hurts or causes a flare-up.

Does that mean you should never do it again? If you felt “healed” when avoiding the movement, but pain returned once it was reintroduced—does that mean you’re “re-injured”?

Stop right there. That’s a false dichotomy.

This is what happens when we over-associate pain with injury, healing, or the state of our physical health. Pain is not always a reliable indicator of damage.

The truth is, it’s not that the activity can’t ever be part of your life again—it’s just that your body doesn’t yet have the capacity to handle it.

By capacity, we mean strength, mobility, endurance, positional tolerance, and your nervous system’s perception of safety. If your body interprets a movement as threatening, it may produce a pain signal—even in the absence of tissue damage.

Where I see many rehab professionals struggle is in identifying appropriate entry points—a variation of the desired movement that is tolerable in your current state. The next step is to gradually increase the challenge of that entry point until your capacity matches or exceeds the demands of the original activity.

The vast majority of our tissues are capable of adaptation. They respond to stress with growth—improving in strength, endurance, and mobility. They also respond to the absence of stress by weakening and deconditioning. Unfortunately, previously injured tissues are often treated as permanently fragile, when in reality, they can regain capacity through appropriately dosed and progressed stress.

This counterintuitive truth is often the missing link—what allows someone to move from a life of fragility to one of resilience and abundance.

It’s time to break free from the “can’t ever” mindset—and start embracing the “can’t yet.” Our bodies are adaptive, capable, and far more resilient than we give them credit for.