It’s finally spring in the Highlands! With the first warm weekend of the season brings lots of people out exercising (socially distancing of course). Inevitability around this time every spring we go from being rugged up in the colder months to out enjoying the sunshine, being active. With this new found opportunity to get out and about and exercise also comes some hard truths, I am not as young as I once was.

It was in fact, around this time last year I was out running one of our Labradors, the blonde one who is impossible to walk easily and will often pull on the lead making our so called jogs, well, redundant. I felt it happen, my right hamstring tweaked and strained and I pulled up short. I knew instantly what I’d done, damn.

Over the ensuing days my leg went from feeling painful to tight and restricted, the catching sensation grabbing me with seemingly innocuous movements. I kept asking my wife, what do you think? It’ll be alright, right?

As physios will do, when you sustain an injury yourself you tend to jump into reviewing the latest information and studies to help you get back on track, feeling better and out doing what you love quicker. You also obsess over every bad, not good, case of this particular injury you have ever treated.

In my search I came across a little study from the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy which managed to show a strong correlation in hamstring tenderness and time frames to return to sport, so much so that they developed a nice little equation to determine this:

 Number of Days to Return to Sport = (% Length of tenderness * 2.3)- 4.4

I had my time frame, now I just needed to get stuck into my rehab! If you’re having issues with return to activity, starting a new sport, maybe you’ve decided to train for a marathon or loose some weight, reach out. Often just knowing how long it will take to recover from an injury is comforting, once you know it will be 1 or 2 or 3 months before you kick off again you can take the anxiety about returning as soon as possible and just focus on daily improvement.

Good luck with your recovery

 See you in the clinic,

Andrew

Source: Schmitt B, Tyler T, Kweicien S et al (2020) Mapping Tenderness to palpation predicts return to play following acute hamstring strain. IJSPT