Pulled hamstring recovery: what day three looks like

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's your host, co-host Sebastian with the Restoring Human Movement Podcast. Thanks for joining the Movement Movement. Now, if you've been following along with the show, you realize that at the beginning part of 2025, I had another hamstring tear. It's a small one, it appears, and this is going to be, I think, the third or fourth podcast that I'm doing on that particular topic. I think last year, when I had mine in October time, I intended on documenting a little bit better, but I didn't really feel like it.

If you had an injury, you don't want to always talk about it and always share, so I'm doing a better job to share this time and give you guys better details of how I manage it and how I'm going to get back into the game very quickly. So, I won't bore you with the details of how I did it because we covered them in the podcast, but I am going to tell you at least the update for, this is day, I guess, three, so it happened on Sunday. So, it's Monday, Tuesday, it's Wednesday right now. This is day three of that hamstring pop on the left side. Now, yesterday, after I did the podcast to about day two, I actually went for a long walk.

I was curious to see if I would actually make it that far. There's a baseball field, a high school baseball field, about half a mile from my house, and so I took the dog, I made sure that I brought some treats because she walks better and she doesn't pull me if she has some treats, and we went for a walk. And I went over there and I sat down and watched a couple innings and I came back. And so, I was surprised actually I held up very well. I did limp a little bit when we were just starting out on the way there and also on the way back, but I was actually walking in a pretty good clip. The previous days, I did not document this super well again, but if you see some of the videos we have on YouTube, you'll see me crawling up the stairs.

Like, I couldn't physically, like, lift my leg. I had to drag it. So, I was getting stuck on rugs and I had to lift it and contort my body a little bit upward to when I was getting up the stairwell. And I was dragging legs. Like, you can hear the shoe drag on the ground as I was coming from the car. So, I am impressed by how much better I'm getting just over the course of three days. And today, the plan is to do another long walk, but also continue on with the rehab program that we have. I just recorded the video yesterday for you guys for the virtual surgery for a hamstring pull or a small tear.

Now, to be fair, and this is on YouTube, by the way, I will put a link in the show notes for the show on your podcast player. To be fair, a lot of times people don't get surgeries for their hamstring tears or small ones unless it's a voles at the pelvis area. But it's not super common. So, just, but a lot of you will end up freaking out and thinking that you need surgery. So, I thought I would label it that. These are the things that I would have people do for the first four weeks after this injury, after learning from my four different hamstring tears. So, today, the plan is I am going to get a little bit more aggressive about some of the things that I was lacking on yesterday because I did record videos for you guys.

I didn't get to get all my rehab in. But if you go into that video, you'll see that there's things like three-month prone, which is like a version of like a plank. I did do that quite a bit with some of my patients yesterday on telehealth and in person. So, I did do quite a bit of that. I did my isometrics for my hamstring. I did get on and off the ground quite a bit. So, I was trying to use both legs. So, I did end up doing some single leg heel elevated split squats. But I didn't really do a ton of glute facilitation, which I will plan on doing today. So, the goal of today, and I'm going into work early to get this done, is to do my isometrics first.

Then, I'm going to do some three-month prones, which is going to be for the belly wall, belly wall primers. And I'm going to grab a band, a glute band, and do butterflies and bridges until my glutes are just on fire. I want to almost see if I can do weighted split squats today, heel elevated, of course. But I did test out yesterday in the video to see if I can do a sled. It appears I can do a sled. And the way I tested it was I was leaning onto a wall or a bench and trying to push it. Again, heel is elevated. So, it's usually safe to do. And I feel okay doing that. But I don't know if I'm going to actually prioritize that today.

I don't think I'm going to be able to make it into the gym where the sled is. But something I have been thinking about was cardiovascular. If you've been listening to the show for a long time, you realize I don't love cardiovascular work. I don't love hopping on treadmill and running. I don't like distance running that much. I don't really love swimming. But if you get me chasing baseballs in a practice while people are hitting them, I can be out there for hours. So, I love more of sport-oriented cardiovascular fitness. And yeah, there is sprinting involved. So, it's not steady state cardio. But if you're moving continually for four hours, that's quite a bit of cardiovascular fitness and the heart rate is elevated.

So, I'm a bigger fan of that. But obviously, I can't do that right now. So, what do I need to do or what's going to be safe and pleasurable for me to do for cardiovascular fitness over these next few weeks? I'm thinking I could go to the gym. I have access to a pool. I'll tell you my yeah buts with it. And I can't guarantee this is going to be a problem. But it's what I'm thinking of what may end up happening is I may end up getting there and all the lanes are taken. I have no idea at this gym when it's the busiest because I've showed up at different times. And it's super busy in the morning. You see the pool is steaming.

So, at least it's warmer than it is outside. Today in Huntington Beach, it feels like it's 40 degrees outside, which is very cold for us. And so, I'm not really used to this cold. I don't know if I want to jump into a pool with it. So, those are all my yeah buts or excuses. But if I really wanted to get it in, that's probably getting the way to go. Now, another thing I probably could do is probably jump on the Assault bike that I have or sorry, the Echo bike that I have or I can go to the gym and use. They have a chain driven bike or an air bike. So, I could do that because the heel is elevated and just make sure that I'm pressing more into my balls of my feet than having my heels in contact with the pedals.

And so, that is something I could do. And I may actually do that on and off for a little bit. But if you're like me and you hate cardiovascular fitness, like how long can you really do that without losing your mind? Like I don't want to do an air bike slow and steady pace. I know that you guys may be saying, oh, an air bike is for like high intensity. You don't have to use it that way. You can use something of a slower pace. And I mean, I've been on an air bike before for 25 minutes. And so, I could do something like that, but I prefer, I always prefer to break it up. I would usually do something like air bike for two minutes and then do something else like squats or swings or carries.

Something that's more of like a work capacity circuit. So, I could just keep heart rate elevated. Ideally, if I was at the gym, what I could do is something like maybe a carry and the air bike. And there is like a strip where I can do both of them. So, that may be my best option. But, again, I'm not saying cardio is something I need to do for my recovery right now. It can help out with inflammatory aspects and there's a lot of benefits to cardiovascular fitness. But, I don't think by forcing cardio right now, it's really going to give me any more benefit than just doing what I'm already doing right now and giving myself a little bit of time.

But, I more so think about like what would I be missing out on if over the course of the next month, I wasn't doing as much cardio because it didn't feel good or I was worried I didn't have options that really were working well for me. And, I think my cardiovascular fitness will start to go down. I'd have to look up into the research of what they say for timelines and things like this. But, I believe from what I recall was that certain attributes like sprinting or strength or endurance, like they all start to dissipate at different timelines. From what I understand strength, it's going to take like 30 days.

I heard endurance is kind of the same thing, 30 days. Like, if you go to high altitude and you want your red blood cells to acclimate, it takes, I think, 10 days. Heat acclimation, I think, takes about 10 days or so too. So, there's things that take a little bit of time to either improve or degrade. So, again, sprinting, I think, is about 5. Cardiovascular, I think, is about 30. Strength is about 30 or so. So, I'm not really losing out on anything by not doing that. But, I think what I'll probably fare better with, I'll tolerate better, is going to be strength work and making sure that I'm just keeping my habits about me.

My fear with injuries like this, whether it be a back injury or hamstring or hip impingement or what have you. Like, I've seen plenty of people in my baseball league, they don't come back. Like, they lose their habit. They say, oh, I'm just too old for that. And I'm sure you guys have heard me say that a lot over the course of, if you've been listening to the podcast. And I do think there is something to getting older. I'm 42, I think, or 43. And I don't feel like I recover as fat. I don't feel like my mind is any different. But I don't think that all of my aches and pains that I recovered from 5 years ago, like the hamstring injury I had 5 years ago, was due to purely age.

I don't think, I mean, I got injured when I was 15 playing baseball with my low back disc. That's not age. But there are certain things that are, I think, attributes that are a little bit more age related. But I don't want to blame all this on age. And I think the easiest thing to do when you get on, when you start having massive habit changes associated to injury is like, it's easy to kind of do what I did when I'm talking about swimming. You make your yeah buts. I'm just kind of old for that. And, you know, like my kids are playing ball now, so I don't really need to. I can just go coach them.

You know what? I got other things that came up on Sunday, so I can't really, like all that kind of stuff, right? I take a lot of pleasure in playing baseball. I want to do it for a lifetime. I want to make sure that my body has all of the attributes that it needs to be able to do that. It needs some strength. It needs some endurance. I need to be able to sprint. I need to be able to swing and bat. So there's a lot of things that I do need and I should keep them conditioned while I'm doing this. So this could be the last podcast on this I do for the actual week one protocol because as it goes, what you do on week one, day one and day two is similar to what you do on day four and day five.

And what you do on day three is similar to what you do on day six. But if you look at the protocol that we have that I put on YouTube, I've actually already broken it. I went for a long walk yesterday and that was day two. I should be doing that today and I should be doing more of the rest, quote unquote, rest day to day versus what I'm going to do today. I'm not saying you have to follow it to the T. That's what makes it fun to work with people on these types of things is you can blend things based upon what time they have in the day. Like I didn't have a lot of time yesterday to do the strength part.

Like I said, I recorded a video for you guys. I did a couple of podcasts for you guys. There was a baseball game that I wanted to go see. This was the thing I wanted to do. So there's nothing wrong with like interchanging days, but being smart about where you're adding things in and making sure you're not like blowing, you know, too much, putting too much load into the tissue at one time. So I would suggest look at those videos, probably the last podcast I'll do this week. Maybe we'll see how I feel tomorrow, but just a quick update. I, I'm able to actually kind of jog up the stairs now. Crazy.

Like I, I, I showed my girlfriend that I said, it's too bad you didn't take more videos when I was to say, well, I could have put them in our YouTube video, the YouTube video to show where we come. She's like, yeah, you weren't bad long enough. And that's not to say that I, you know, like it was a small injury. It was certainly big. I can feel that pop. Like that's an indication that it's a big enough injury, but I'm recovering so much faster. My nutrition is good. My sleep's good. My water intake is good. I'm doing, I think all the right things for it. My fearfulness of movement is, is lower.

So there's a lot of things that I am doing, but I, I was able to jog up the stairs, you know, that's fantastic. I'm actually got some spring back in my step. So I hope this was helpful to everybody. Again, go to the description for this video for the virtual surgery video week one and through, I'm going to get through week four on our YouTube player. And if you guys want help figuring out what you should do, remember we do have telehealth and our office has practitioners licensed in different States. I mean, for instance, out of today, North Carolina, Texas, and California, I can actually send you for imaging in those States.

I can tell you what your diagnosis is. And we have other States as well with the other practitioners. So reach out to us. If you guys want to do consultation, I'd love to talk to you and help you get back into the game. 714-502-4243 or email us info at p2sportscare.com. Take care.