Day 10 of a hamstring tear: training, loading and what comes next

You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement Podcast, where movement experts discuss the latest evidence-based practices to help you and your clients move with mastery. Hey everyone, it is your co-host Sebastian with the Restoring Human Movement Podcast. Thanks for joining the show. If you've been listening to it recently, you realize that I sustained a hamstring tear. This is my fourth in the last 20 years, but I had two over the course of the last six months to different legs. And so this time I decided to document a little bit better progress that I'm making, tips that I have for you, as well as recording some of the exercise series that I'm choosing to use based upon the knowledge and experience that I have.

So just to let you know, this is day, it probably happened last Sunday, so it's seven days from the, today's Wednesday of the following week. So what is that? Eight days, nine days, 10 days, maybe, probably 10 days, right? Seven plus three, 10 days later. And I went to the gym this morning. I'll tell you everything that I did at the gym and things that felt pretty good and things that didn't. Also, if you're dealing with this and you want to see the videos of the things that I'm showing and talking about in the description for the podcast, we have a link to our YouTube channel directly to the playlist where I supply those.

And if you ever want help from us directly, we are licensed in different states and offer telehealth as well. Call us 714-502-4243 or email info at p2sportscare.com. Now, this morning I woke up at 530. I usually wake up around 630 and I always tell myself on days where I wake up early, you know, I might as well go to the gym early. You know, I'd prefer to do things in the morning if I can and it's easy to get a first win in the day. But today, waking up, I kind of laid there and thought, since it is, you know, 10 days removed from the injury, I kind of don't want to do anything. It's so hard. It's so hard to want to do, want to go to the gym and, you know, suffer through.

I can't really run still. I can jog or what I call prancing. I can walk with no problem. Actually, I did walk close to three, four miles yesterday just at one burst and no problems at all and, but I can't really do deadlifting. I can't do single leg hinges. So there's a lot of things I still can't really do and or want to do. So it's frustrating to want to go if I'm limited with some things. But I know from last time when I did this, the whole reason why I signed up for this gym in the first place is because I had access to a sled and some turf where I can do some pushing or it's basically a loaded carry category of exercise.

As I talked about in some of the other podcasts and videos that I've done, I've talked about how a compensatory aspect or pattern with people with hamstring tear is they tend to bend their knee and you can bend down to the floor, but you don't want to see it like you're in high heels. Like you keep that heel elevated pretty aggressively. But if you do that, you can actually feel pretty good. The heel drops down. It's a little bit of a problem, but at this point in the game, 10 days removed, I can do that now. I've done single leg hinges just with very, very lightweight or just more of a pattern just to expose it to it.

And I do pick up objects that way. But the first thing I did when I went into the gym this morning was tell myself that I just need to spend time doing stuff into the quote unquote, get back into it phase. I haven't worked out since last Thursday, but I've really gone to this gym to do stuff that is not instructed by a trainer because I do have a trainer I see on my own too. I suggest everybody do that. I first went in and did something called a lateral squat and I will show this on the videos, but let me describe it to you because it's a little bit foreign to people and then I'll describe the purpose a little bit later too.

So I bring in something called a physical industry strap into the gym every time I go just in case I decided to do a lateral loaded pattern. And today I decided to use it. I went over to a cable machine, found one that was empty, hard to do. And I put it at a low setting down to the floor and I set it up to about, I think it was around 30, 40 pounds just to test it out. And I looped it around my body, attached it around my hip, and then I'm doing almost like a lateral lunge, but the vector is pulling me into the diagonal part of the anchor point. So it's not really downward movement. It's not a caustic squat.

It's not a lateral lunge. It's a lateral squat, we call it. And so I explored that first with my good leg. Felt fine, felt easy. But again, you know, this was warm up. I just barely stepped in the gym. And then I tried on the other leg too. Both of them were okay. I decided to make this into a little circuit because I didn't want to, again, kind of lazy. I didn't want to do a full-fledged warm up on other things. So I thought I warmed my body temperature up by greasing up my pattern and keeping the weight a little lighter as I went into the actual like working sets. And so I decided to pair this with a half kneeling one arm row.

I still used the cable or sorry, I used the cable as well as the strap because I was too lazy to take it off and put a handle on. But honestly, it doesn't matter. You don't need a handle. So I did that. And similar to, I did it kind of light and just went for like about 10, 15 reps or so. I did the same thing on lateral squats. Then I moved on to a standing, as you can imagine it, a split stance press, single arm press. I still had the same strap. I was leaning away from the machine. So I still had to drive through the lower half of my body and my foot into the ground to keep upright or else the machine was going to pull me back.

And then I would, I just pressed again, same rep scheme, about 10 to 15 or so. And I went through this just about three times and I slowly increased the weight just to test things out. This took me about probably 15 minutes or so to feel it out. I actually set up the machine in the lateral squat to make it more knee dominant in the beginning because I know that's going to feel a little better for my hamstring. And then I went more hip dominant because I know what I'm going to lack on here as I start to come out of this injury is that if I can't deadlift and single leg hinge and hex bar deadlift, and how am I going to get a hip dominant pattern in?

I can probably do something like a hip thruster off of a bench or glute bridges, but you know, I'm still missing a good part of it. I'm still missing the weight bearing part. So I decided to explore some hip dominant version of that exercise too, which just, it's a change of orientation and line up to the machine. Again, I'll show that in the video as well. Eventually I got actually a bit heavier. So the full cable stack or the full weight stack on that machine is, I believe it's, it was like 85 or 90 pounds. I went, I went up by about one plate each time. And as we all know, the plates aren't always equal.

The little ones at the top are smaller and so on. I ventured up into five sets of five and I got into, I think it was like 72, 73 pounds or something like that. It was probably a dot five in there or something. And I went for fives. I didn't go for a burn. I went for a heavy feeling. If you haven't heard me discuss the difference between burning or corrective exercises and strength ones is the common denominator is going to be, there's not going to be a burn aspect of the strength exercise. It's just going to feel hard or heavy. And so I was looking for the feeling of heavy or hard. If I was going for more of a, again, a facilitating exercise, like turning the glute on or turning the quad on, I would go for the burn.

If I was going more for a bodybuilding, mass building type of thing, I would go, again, I would go for the burn, but my reps would be a lot higher. My weight would be lower. And I just hammered those babies out and I went through that little circuit there. And I feel good at the end, actually. There was only one moment where I really felt my hamstrings start to catch. And it wasn't during the exercise itself. It was actually when I was walking away from the machine with the belt on me. So I had to be a little bit more strategic how I did that and kind of shuffle out to that position. But overall, I think it was a positive experience.

I am happy I loaded my leg because what we know from having injuries is that one of the things that goes, or one of the, sorry, one of the biggest mistakes that I have seen people make is they deload the entire limb or the entire person. They stopped doing things. But ideally, what we want is we still want some strength training involved with the patterns and exercises that it'll tolerate. And if that doesn't work, and say you're like post-op or something like that, and like you still need to isometrically load certain areas. I didn't do my isometric loading today, the hamstring. I need to. I'm going to do it right now as I'm driving with you guys.

But you still need to keep an adequate amount of load in there because we know that the body, the tendons, the muscles, even ligaments remodel based upon the load that you put on it. And if you rob that area of load over the course of even a couple of weeks, they've shown in animal studies that it becomes disorganized, haphazard patterns, and almost basically like a scar. So I don't want that for myself. I want to minimize my scar tissue formation and make it into a functional unit. And so I'm going to load these areas the best that I can. Also decreases the amount of strength loss that I have over the healing process and gets you back in the field faster.

The next thing that I did was I went over to the sled and the pull-up area. So there's, again, I mentioned earlier that I chose this gym because they had a sled and a turf. There was nobody on it, which is great. So I usually load the sled up with 45, actually 5 pound, 45, 5 pound, 45, and 25. And I do a heavier sled push. The reason why it's alternating is because it's easier to take the plates off. If you put a little, if you put a smaller weight in between them. And so I just put on a 45 today and I admit the first couple steps, it kind of didn't feel great on my hamstring, but I went the distance of, I don't know how, remember how long that's, that turf patch is.

But I want to say it's probably close to 30 yards. So I pushed it 30 yards there, changed the handles of the sled so they would fit on the other part of the sled and I don't have to twist the sled about and turn it around. And then I would push it all the way back. I did this mainly for more of like a cardio aspect. It's lighter. It's more time. And I would mix that in with pull-ups. I did four pull-ups, not to the point of failure, went back and pushed the sled and I did this for about 15 minutes. I, I hate cardio. I really hate cardio. I saw a guy at the gym today that I know that I, we discussed the same thing.

He hates cardio. I hate cardio. A lot of people hate cardio. I hate it. The way I get my cardio in is doing, uh, chasing baseballs and playing an actual baseball game. So I need to make sure that I keep some form of cardiovascular fitness in. And that was my way of doing it today. I'll probably explore things like the, like an air bike next. I don't know if I'm, I don't know if I did a podcast since I went swimming too. I swam at the gym and I was perfectly fine. I went in for 30 minutes and God, I want to stop after 20 minutes. I just didn't want to do it. But nice thing with doing the pool is that since there's usually like a restriction of how many lanes there is, there's, there's always somebody waiting.

And so you look kind of like a turd if you're in there, just kind of wasting time. So it forced me to do work and continually moving. It was hard for me. I realized how much of a bad swimmer I am, but also remember how good of a swimmer I've become since I started swimming years and years ago after doing some triathlons. But it was, it was nice. It was nice just to, to get moving and so on. I didn't have any hamstring issues at all. I tried different strokes. I tried, I did breaststroke. I did freestyle. I did back, backstroke. I did some survival strokes, which is kind of like swimming to the side acting like you're holding a buoy and just continually moving.

So I think the takeaways that I want you guys to have today, and I did take a video also of myself doing this lateral squat at the gym. I felt like a turd sitting on my camera, but I did it just to show you guys that it can be done. And you guys, for the most part, if you've dealt with a hamstring injury, just like I have, like you're no different than me. I'm 42 years old. I try to keep myself in good physical shape. I try to eat really well. I've been trying to eat a lot of protein over the course of the healing process. Make sure to not to really drink too much alcohol because it's a blood thinner and it may affect some of the recovery process.

But I did have some drinks last week. And so you guys are no different. So I want to show you guys that the healing timeline for a lot of these injuries, especially hamstrings, can be actually very short. But also it's short if we're only talking about the timeline for activities of daily living. Like I can walk, I can play with the dog, I can pick up objects off the ground, I can help people around the office, I get in and out of a car, that's all good. But if he asks me to sprint, even 50% sprint, I can't do it yet. So the recovery timeline though for doing active as a daily living, like I just mentioned, and also getting back into the gym to make sure the remainder of your body is going to hold up well in your recovery process is actually fairly quick.

10 days for me, I was working out again at day, so it happened last Sunday. On Thursday, I went to go see my strength coach. And for the most part, a lot of things were really good. I worked around it really well, challenged it a little bit, did some isometrics and it was, call it a day. So you guys can get back very quickly and it's totally advised to do things within your tolerances. We played smash ball last Friday. I went to the baseball field and did some shuffling drills. I didn't play in the game this Sunday. And I felt good that I was out there and cheering on my team. And I think I did a podcast about that a couple of days ago.

I think the next adventure that I'm going to go into with this is to see how I want to load this single leg hinge pattern. I would choose a single leg hinge probably because it's most problematic. And I think as the tissue starts to mend itself even more so, we say like around the three-week window is when a lot of the scaffolding has really laid itself down. That around that period of time, three weeks, I'm going to start exploring a single leg hinge. Probably not weighted at first. I'll probably do some isometrics again. And I'll start to add weight and just go up to my tolerance. Now, my plans for this week for going back to baseball is I really want to play the game Sunday or some of the game.

I really want to. I can see that in the group techs that we have that some of the outfielders are not going to be there. I'm not quite sure if I can be of any help because my range is very limited. I can throw. I can hit and I can, you know, saunter or prance down the baseline to first base, but probably not run the bases. So I don't want to hurt my team's chance of winning. But also, I really want to play and I need to make sure to check myself to make sure I don't hurt myself again. But what I do plan on doing, though, is in two days or on Friday, I'm going to go to the baseball field. And there's a few guys that have the morning off and I'm going to hit with them.

I'm going to throw and we're going to take ground balls. And so this is my first exposure into feeling again. And I am not going to go crazy with it. I'm going to spend two hours being on the field. Again, this is my version of cardio, just getting movement. And I think that would help me mentally knowing if I could play any of the game at all. But also, I think this is a good time to start exposing that single leg hinge, but through movement. Like it doesn't have to be a weighted exercise. I think general movement is going to be the best starting point for me. And doing it when and not with a non-competition type of scenario, like on a Friday practice, is probably the easiest.

Now, if you guys are having trouble with your hamstring or other parts of your leg and you want some help, again, reach out to us. We do very affordable consultations to see if we can help you. 714-502-4243 or email us info at p2sportscare.com. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. There's tons of free videos we have in there. But remember, YouTube, just like podcasts, we put context in those videos, but also they're not structured. I tell people all the time when we meet with them in the consultation that they can totally recover from this on their own. It just depends how long and how much they're willing to suffer through it.

We're basically the cheat code. Like we will organize things and help you through them more efficiently so you can get less mental strain and physical strain as you're recovering from it. But most people do recover, but it's easier with someone telling you exactly what to do. And that's what our job is. So thanks for listening to the podcast, subscribe, and I'll see you next time.