When the Utah Royals’ Becky Sauerbrunn returned from her injury, she didn’t just return to soccer. She began training for raiding tombs.
Well, sort of.
Magnus Lygdbäck, the personal trainer and nutritionist who helped actress Alicia Vikander put on 12 pounds of muscle to play Laura Croft in the latest Tomb Raider movie, flew out to Utah to train with Sauerbrunn and promote the movie. They produced a video of the Tomb Raider training challenge and began to spread it through social media leading up to Tomb Raider’s United States release Friday.
“It was also a good idea because it’s such a strong female lead to somehow tie it in with women that are also strong in their fields,” Sauerbrunn said, “and that happens to be professional soccer players.”
Sauerbrunn was the ideal candidate for the promotional workout. Not only is she a leader on the U.S. women’s national team, but she’s also a video game fanatic. (Tomb Raider was a video game before it was a movie.)
Sauerbrunn posted a video on Twitter last week of her completing the Tomb Raider training challenge: a 10-yard bear crawl, 10 rotational kick-throughs and 10 skaters.
She moved with ease, never giving away that less than two months earlier, she had been hobbling around with a boot on her left foot.
Sauerbrunn began to feel an aching in her left foot as she prepared for USWNT January camp. It would go away between training sessions, Sauerbrunn said, but return the next time she worked out. She had a precautionary MRI, which revealed a stress reaction. U.S. Soccer announced on Jan. 11 that Sauerbrunn had been ruled out of camp due to injury.
“It wasn’t terrible,” Sauerbrunn said of the pain, “but it was something that could become a stress fracture, which then would have put me out for months. So it was really good that we caught it as early as we did.
She missed January camp, and with that, the USWNT’s 5-1 win against Denmark. The injury then kept her off the roster for the SheBelieves Cup, a tournament the U.S. won last week, allowing just one goal through three matches.
“It was the first camp that I have not been to since I really joined the team and started playing significant minutes,” Sauerbrunn said, “and so it was hard being away from them. … They’re an amazing group of women, and I’m glad that they won because they deserve to win.”
Sauerbrunn spent three weeks in a boot, restricted to just lifting and riding a bike. After a second MRI, she was cleared to gradually increase load-bearing and impact activities. Roughly two weeks ago she returned to full soccer training.
Healthy in time for the NWSL season, Sauerbrunn was freed up to work out like a tomb raider.
“I don’t normally bear crawl,” Sauerbrunn said. “I don’t normally do breakdancing moves, basically is what the second one was. But it was really fun.”