Maxwell, 27, missed the first two weeks of the premiership season after suffering internal injuries following an Andrew Embley bump during the NAB Cup semi-final in Perth on March 5.
The injury saw him spend two nights in hospital and required two weeks of bed rest, but Maxwell said he was ready to go during a wide-ranging discussion on Talking Footy with Leigh Matthews on afl.com.au on Friday.
"I'm at the stage where the conditioning staff feel like I'm ready to go straight back in," Maxwell said.
"I was putting my hand up to play this week and, of course when a player does that coming off a more serious injury, more often than not the conditioning staff and doctors say 'No, you can wait one more'.
"I've now done over a week of full training and will do all of next week with the plan of playing next Friday night against the Blues."
The Magpies take on North Melbourne on Saturday afternoon with Maxwell keen to see the side improve on its first-up showing against Port Adelaide that resulted in a 75-point win.
Maxwell said Mick Malthouse had raised the bar in a number of key areas in the Magpies' game plan, but admitted the team has failed to hit several of those new targets to this point.
"[But] we don't want to be at 100 per cent right now," he added.
"During the pre-season we said 'This is what we need to achieve to win another premiership'. Through the NAB Cup and round one we missed a lot of those benchmarks. We haven't reached the potential that we feel we need to get to.
"[But] you can't start off right at the top of your game straight away because you just can't sustain that for the whole season, so we just want to see a gradual improvement with every week that goes past.
"Hopefully by August you're close to your best going into September."
Collingwood has remained steadfast in its defence of the succession plan that means this season marks the end of Malthouse's reign regardless of the outcome of the race for the flag.
Maxwell backed successor Nathan Buckley to transfer the traits that made him such a successful footballer to his senior coaching career, but the skipper doesn't expect massive changes to the game plan in 2012 despite Malthouse's recent revelation that Buckley had voiced his reservations about certain areas of on-field strategy.
"He won't reinvent the wheel," he said.
"We managed to win the premiership last year so obviously we're doing something right. What he'll do is he'll have a similar game plan and style, but he will tweak certain things and change certain things around as he goes which you'd expect him to.
"You wouldn't want him to come in and be Mick Malthouse. You'd want him to come in and be Nathan Buckley and that's what he's been hired to do."
The extensive interview also saw Maxwell express his concern that the substitute rule will lead to more fatigue injuries and reiterate his desire for a fairer slice of the AFL revenue pie for players who he feels have gone unheard on too many issues for too long.
"I've never really seen an alignment of all the players together like I've seen [recently], even the players contacting each other between teams has been pretty amazing," he said, adding Jobe Watson's failed protest over the sub rule had still made a valid point.
"It's not so much that the players think this rule is no good. It's that the players are a major stakeholder in this game and we want to be considered when they're coming up with new rules or discussing things that are going to affect us.
"We're the ones who are out there playing. We're the ones who are out there every single week so we want to make sure that we get our say.
