How to Recover from a Hamstring Tear the Right Way
Transcript
Jeffrey Jones
Really, in the initial 5 to 7 days when you’re in that acute phase of a soft tissue injury, the goal is to protect the area and not make anything worse. Your body’s got the ability to naturally go to that inflammatory process, which isn’t always a bad thing. Inflammation is necessary when you’ve got a soft tissue injury; you need that inflammatory phase for your body to clean up the debris from that soft tissue injury.
The old mnemonic has been RICE, rest, ice, compression, elevation. However, it has been proven for a long time now in the research to be something that actually slows the healing process. There are all kinds of different mnemonics that are super long and don’t do the job of an actual mnemonic, making things shorter. But the general gist of it now is protect the area. You can still use some compression and elevation to bring some blood flow to the area, help with that tissue healing, and then movement, light exercise that doesn’t overly aggravate, still allows that tissue to go through its natural healing process.
Once you’re through that initial inflammatory phase, that’s the time you tell your body how you want it to heal. Soft tissues should generally be kind of aligned. The muscle contracts and relaxes. When you get an injury to the area and you stop moving that area altogether, the body will heal it, but it’s gonna do it in a way that isn’t super functional. You’re gonna lose elasticity, you’re gonna lose the ability to actually use that soft tissue the way it’s supposed to. So once you’re out of that initial pain phase, you need to start telling that soft tissue how you want it to heal, which is long, flexible with some elasticity and strong.
That’s gonna come in the form of exercise to help strengthen the area as well as exercises that stretch or elongate that muscle, without getting too much into the weeds with it. That can take quite a while, especially if you’re dealing with that grade 2 or you’re in a grade 3 hamstring tear or any soft tissue tear. That process can take 6 to 12 weeks. Depending on the athlete, depending on the type of person we’re dealing with, their overall health, how quickly they heal, but it’s a slow process, no different than being in the gym and trying to get big muscles. It doesn’t happen overnight like that. When we’re telling soft tissue how we want it to behave and respond, it’s gonna happen slowly over time and it just comes down to that consistency.