Coming back from an injury

Doing nothing is a decision, and usually the wrong one

An injured hamstring does not mean an injured everything. Most injuries leave the large majority of your body perfectly trainable, and the athletes who come back best are the ones who kept training everything else. Detraining for six weeks means returning to sport with a healed hamstring and no aerobic base — which is its own injury risk.

The three questions that shape everything

1. How irritable is it? Does it settle quickly, or does it flare for days from small things? Highly irritable tissue needs smaller doses more often.
2. How much load does it tolerate? Can you load it fully, partially, or not at all right now? This decides what goes in the program today, not what the diagnosis was.
3. What have you been cleared for? Cleared to train, train with limits, or told to rest. This one is not yours to guess.

Those are the exact three inputs Train Smart's injury intake asks for, because between them they determine what the program can safely contain — and the answers change week to week, so the program has to as well.

What a sensible week looks like while healing

• Train everything unaffected, normally. An upper-body injury does not stop you squatting.
• Load the injured area at a dose it tolerates, if you have been cleared to. Loading is usually part of the rehab, not the opposite of it.
• Keep the engine. Swap running for a bike, a rower or a ski erg if the impact is the problem. Losing the aerobic base is the avoidable part.
• Check in honestly. Pain during, pain after, and pain the next morning are three different signals and the third is the one that matters most.

Progression rules that keep you out of trouble

• Change one thing at a time — load, or volume, or speed. Never two.
• Small increments, more often, beats a big jump when it "feels fine".
• The week you return to full training is a big load spike by definition. Plan for it. See the load guide.
• Re-injury risk is highest in the first weeks back. Previous injury is one of the strongest predictors of the next one — that is the fact to respect.

Where objective testing helps

Symmetry testing is genuinely useful here: a single-leg hop comparing the injured and healthy sides gives you something other than feel. A commonly used threshold is a limb difference around 10%, used as one of several return-to-sport criteria. Take it to your physio rather than treating it as a green light on its own.