ABSTRACT
Sports injuries present a serious burden for athletes and teams, causing injury practitioners to question how we might best reduce sports injury burden. Not least of which, this burden is in part caused by the fact that sports injury is often a time where athletes can experience psychosocial stress, anxiety and emotional disturbance as negative responses to injury, and their ability to make rational decisions about rehabilitation activities can be compromised. A central concern associated with an athlete's ability to make rational decisions is how this might impact on their choices about clinic-based and home-based rehabilitation behaviours, specifically how well an athlete adheres to their rehabilitation programme. Consequently, this chapter will (1) discuss the context and meaning of rehabilitation and rehabilitation adherence (RA), (2) discuss the scale of the RA problem and the methods of measuring RA, (3) discuss psychosocial considerations that positively and negatively influence injury RA and (4) highlight ways that athletes can improve their RA.
