Holding Out for a Hero

You know what we haven't talked about in a while? My knee.

HAHA, bet you thought you had heard the last of that. But no, my knee is still there, and it's still bloody annoying.

In fact, it's kind of even more annoying than it has been. It's been four months since the meniscus tear, and it's definitely better. I can walk without crutches and without a knee brace. I can walk for longer distances, and I am back squatting (to a box) and deadlifting.

But I still wince every time I stand up, I hobble first thing in the morning, and stairs are very much my nemesis.

I said to Riley the Physio this week, "is it normal for this bit to be boring and frustrating," and his response was "yeah, it's a grind."

This bit - the past few weeks and, apparently, the next couple of months - is the bit where it's getting better, but it's still not better better. I am like 65-70% of the way there, but there's still a way to go, and it's…well, it's just all a bit…meh.

When I am struggling, I often think about what I would tell a colleague I was coaching. And as I did my (endless, interminable) exercises this week, I thought about psychological capital.

PsyCap (which doesn't at all sound like something out of a spy movie from the 1970s) is something organisational psychologists espouse. It’s a theory that there are traits you can develop that make you perform better and be better able to withstand stress and burnout. Like any capital, you can grow it, and lean on it when times are tough.

It's broken down into four traits:

Hope: the idea that you can work towards a better future, that you can have goals and pathways towards them, and that while they may not be easy, you can achieve them.

Efficacy: the belief that your own efforts can get you closer to those goals.

Resilience: the ability to get up when one has fallen down.

Optimism: an expectation that life will generally be good/better in the future. (There is a lot of research that suggests that optimism in itself is useful for wellbeing and longevity.)

This week, I have been mulling that this framework isn't just useful at work, it's useful in the rest of your life, and, for our purposes, in the gym.

I do think that I can have a plan - guided by Carl and Riley -  that will get me back to performance. I think that if I follow that plan, I might even be a better lifter than I was before. And I might manage to (I can't believe I am writing this down) add some more cardio to my programme that will be beneficial for my health and wellbeing. (Ew)

I am generally a very optimistic person, which is both innate and also learned. But I think it's how I have kept showing up these past few months, through the failures of the healthcare system and having to do boxing sitting on a box. The general idea that even though this sucks and I hate it, it will eventually get better.

(Also, stubborn as all hell and unwilling to, at the very least, not try.)

I dislike being called resilient because I always think "well, what other choice was there?" But if I am honest with myself, this year has been - thanks to the injury and other life things - emotionally, mentally, and physically hard. And I have shown up when I have needed to, and I am still standing. A lil wobbly, but we're here.

I gave myself a talking to this week, and it was all about efficacy. My knee isn't getting better by accident. It's getting better because I'm doing the exercises. Because I'm resting it when I need to. Because I'm taking my creatine. Because I asked for help. Because I'm managing my training load.

And I have done this before. When I hurt my back doing an overhead press smack in the middle of my luteal phase, I saw a physio, I altered my programme and I did like 100 back extensions a day for months. (And I still do back extensions whenever I find myself standing in front of the bench in my kitchen.)

As people who move our bodies, sometimes with very heavy weights attached, we're going to occasionally injure them. But doing that also helps us develop the tools to navigate not just those bumps, but the life ones as well.

Every Gains and Brains newsletter could be boiled down to a social media caption: you are more capable than you think, babygirl.

Carl here...

Megan's right that it's a grind. It’s important to acknowledge that there's actually a name for that exact feeling, and it's not specific to knees.

It's called the goal-gradient effect, or sometimes "stuck in the middle." The classic assumption is that motivation climbs steadily the closer you get to a goal. Turns out that's not quite true. Motivation tends to follow a U-shape,  high at the start, high near the finish, and at its lowest right around the halfway mark. People feel enthusiastic early on, pick back up near the end, and lose steam in the bit in between (Bonezzi et al., 2011 & see also Touré-Tillery & Fishbach, 2012).

Megan's at 65-70%. That's not a coincidence, that's almost exactly where the curve predicts the dip would be. The "meh" isn't a sign the plan's failing, it's the predictable low point everyone hits, injury or otherwise.

There's a biological version of the same story. Meniscus tissue heals according to its blood supply, and most tears sit outside the well-vascularised zone, which is part of why these timelines run long no matter how disciplined the rehab is. Standard guidelines reflect this too!  Stair climbing isn't usually reintroduced until 9-10 weeks, early sport activity starts cautiously around 3 months, and full sport participation isn't expected until 6+ months out (OSU Sports Medicine, 2023). "Stairs are my nemesis" isn't suggesting that  Megan is behind schedule, it's right on schedule.

So if the dip is predictable, the more useful question is what actually helps during it? And Megan named most of it without realising she was building a checklist.

"I have a plan, guided by Carl and Riley." Hope theory splits hope into two parts: having a route (pathways), and believing you'll actually walk it (agency). The believing part predicts outcomes more reliably than the route itself (Snyder, 2002). Having a plan matters less than trusting you'll follow it, cool aye?!

"It's getting better because I'm doing the exercises... resting... asking for help... managing my load." This is self-efficacy. A review of 57 studies on home exercise adherence found self-efficacy was one of the strongest predictors of whether people actually stuck with rehab programmes, ahead of motivation alone (Ricke, Dijkstra, & Bakker, 2023). Believing your own effort is part of what makes the effort happen.

Again. "managing my load" gets its own credit, separate from the psychology. The relationship between training load and injury risk is U-shaped, too little load and too much both raise risk, while moderate, consistent load and applying progressive overload is what builds tissue tolerance (Premier Science, 2025). Holding back isn't caution for its own sake. It's the actual mechanism.

"I might even be a better lifter than before... I might manage some cardio." Worth a small caveat here, because optimism can be key in recovery long term. Higher pre-treatment expectations do predict better outcomes after knee surgery (Leon et al., 2024),  but over-optimistic expectations specifically after meniscus surgery have been flagged as a risk factor for disappointment (Pihl et al., 2016). The difference seems to be whether the optimism is tied to the actual plan, or floating free of it. Megan's is tied to the plan, and that's the version that holds.

Back to the  "Carl and Riley" team mention. Current return-to-sport models treat recovery as a collaborative process across clinical, functional, and psychological input, not one person's call (Ardern et al., 2016). Having an accessible, joined-up team isn't a nice-to-have on top of rehab, it's one of the things that actually predicts a better long-term outcome.

So the dip isn't evidence that nothing's happening. It's the part of the curve, biological and psychological, where the biggest invisible recalibration takes place, and it's also exactly where hope, efficacy, sensible optimism, load management, and a team matter most, because that's precisely when natural motivation is at its lowest.

Megan said it best already. You're more capable than you think and the research agrees, when certain things are present!