For Felice Herrig, mental side of injury recovery just as challenging as physical

LAS VEGAS – This past fall, Felice Herrig sailed past the one-year anniversary of the most recent time she stepped in the cage.

Now she’s fast approaching a year since the torn ACL injury that has put her on the shelf. To say she’s itching to get back to work in the UFC’s strawweight division probably is an understatement.

But knee injuries and their subsequent rehab are no joke.

“The mental and physical recovery are both very difficult,” Herrig told MMA Junkie earlier this week in Las Vegas, where she’s been rehabbing at the UFC Performance Institute. “I’ve broken my arm three times. That’s like eight, maybe 12 weeks (recovery), tops. … (With the knee), just trying to relearn things – that’s the hard part. Physically, you’re training every day. But you’re just training to get back to where you were.”

For Herrig, though, it’s been just as much about the mental side of things as it has been getting her knee back in order.

For the first time in her eight-fight UFC career, she’ll have to work off back-to-back losses when she returns. In 2018, she lost decisions to Karolina Kowalkiewicz at UFC 223 and Michelle Waterson at UFC 229. The Kowalkiewicz snapped a four-fight winning streak that had her in title contention.

Herrig said she’s pushing eight months of rehab, and thinks she’s nearing the end. If she returns later this year, it could be close to two years since her loss to Waterson. Meanwhile, the division keeps soldiering on.

“Mentally, you feel like, ‘This sport’s passing me by. I’m irrelevant,’ because people forget about you,” Herrig said. “There are so many UFC fights constantly going on that it’s like, ‘Am I irrelevant? Am I doing enough?’ Recovering from an injury isn’t glamorous. Literally, no one gives a (expletive).”

Being gun shy after her particular injury is a common sports tale. That’s when the mental recovery meshes with the physical, and it’s not always a great mix.

But the good news for Herrig’s recovery is that even when she questions herself, physically, she has people working with her to give reassurances that she’s ready to get back to doing certain things.

“It’s kind of hard to say (how close I am), because some things you don’t know,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, is it in my head? Can I do more than I think that I can?’ It’s also listening to your body, listening to your (physical) therapist. For me, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m still injured. I’m still recovering. I can’t do this. I can’t kick the bag.’

“So I’m really listening to my therapist tell me, ‘No, you can kick the bag. We want you to kick the bag. We want you to start working at taking shots. We want you to do this.’ I’m one of those people who if you give me the green light, I’ll run with it.”