The 20-year-old played his first game for the year last weekend for Williamstown's reserves side and pulled up well from playing 65 per cent of the match.
He plans to ramp things up this week in another reserves hit-out before stepping up into the VFL senior side for a few weeks.
"My goal is to be back by at least round nine," he told afl.com.au.
"Then I want to play finals as well. Once I get in there, I want to stay in there.
"I wish I was up and running now because there are injuries. Whenever I get injured, someone else does too and there's a spot there and I'm not able to take it."
Reid, who played the last three games of the 2009 season before groin trouble influenced his omission for the finals, has finally overcome the operation that saw his abdomen sliced open in September.
He underwent surgery after the osteitis pubis he carried throughout the year degenerated to the extent that cartilage in his left hip broke off on the weekend of the Dogs' first final against Geelong.
"I couldn't walk without crutches for three weeks. I stayed at home and I didn't move off the couch for two after the operation," he said.
"They shaved the bone where it had been banging against the other one. It had been deteriorating and there were bits flying off everywhere."
The operation left him unable to run for 16 weeks and with a 10cm scar he thinks "looks like I've had a caesarean".
However, he said the pain of recovery was nothing compared to what he suffered in silence when he hid the severity of his osteitis pubis from the doctors last year.
"Some days I couldn't walk. If I played on a Saturday, I couldn't get out of bed on Sunday," he said.
"It hurt to put my shorts on, to stand on one leg. All week I wouldn't train.
"They knew I had a sore groin but they didn't know how sore it was."
Defender Stephen Tiller underwent the same operation but on both sides of his groin at the same time and is tracking well.
Fellow young gun Callan Ward is currently removed from heavy training as he battles his own groin soreness, but coach Rodney Eade says his injury isn't as sinister as the other two.
"We've had some reasonable progress over the last week and he's been back running now for over a week," he said.
"It turned out a bit worse than we thought. There was nothing on the scans but there was just a bit of instability in the pelvic bone that caused a bit of shearing. It took a bit of time to get that under control."
Ward hasn't played this season after picking up the soreness in the NAB Cup grand final. He is expected to return through Williamstown in a few weeks' time.
