Late Rehabilitation (On the Field)

From a strictly medical point of view, we subdivide the sports rehabilitation period after injury into four stages (initial stage, intermediate stage, advanced stage, and return to play) that represent a progressive continuum of therapeutic management. This strategy underlines one of the main themes of sports rehabilitation that objective criteria rather than specific timetables should guide clinical decision-making. Late rehabilitation or rehabilitation on field corresponds to the third and fourth phase of the global process of sports rehabilitation. Late rehabilitation program should be performed with on-field training, progressively exposing the player to the football-specific demands, and should only start after well-defined clinical criteria have been obtained. With regard to the safe return to competitions following an athlete as a whole, the rehabilitation team must consider together the biological, neuromechanical, metabolic, and psychosociological aspects of the rehabilitation, with particular emphasis on the ending phases of the functional recovery. Furthermore, each individual has different post-injury sporting goals, levels of skill, and degrees of competitiveness, all of which influence the rehabilitation program.