Getting back to lifting after injury

The part nobody warns you about

The hard part of coming back is not physical. It is that you know exactly what you used to do, you remember the weight, and the gap between that number and today's number is sitting there in your notebook. Most re-injuries happen because someone tried to close that gap in three weeks.

The reframe that makes it easier: you are not returning to your old program. You are starting a new one, at a new starting point, and the old numbers are history rather than a target. The goal is durability. Setbacks come from impatience far more often than from doing too little.

Get cleared first. Ask your clinician three concrete questions before you start, because the answers change the plan: which movements or directions are off the table for now, what pain rule they want you to use, and what would make them want to see you again. Write the answers down. You will want them in week five, when things feel fine and you are tempted to skip ahead.

Start below where you left off. Further below than feels reasonable.

The most reliable starting rule: begin at roughly half of your last working weight, or lighter if the movement involves the injured area, and spend the first two weeks there. Not one session. Two weeks.

This feels absurd. That is the point. Two weeks of easy work tells you how the tissue responds to load without risking much, rebuilds the coordination and confidence that time off eats away, and gives you a clean baseline to progress from. Starting too light costs you two weeks. Starting too heavy can cost you three months.

How long the tissue itself needs varies enormously, which is exactly why your clinician's timeline is the one that matters. The one generalization worth knowing: tendons tend to respond well to slow, controlled, boring work and badly to sudden spikes in load or speed. If a tendon was involved, patience is not caution, it is the treatment.

Pain rules you can actually use

"Listen to your body" is useless advice if nobody says what to listen for. Ask your clinician for the rule they want you to follow. In the absence of one, a widely used framework is a 0 to 10 scale with three checks:

• During the set: discomfort up to about 3 out of 10 is generally acceptable. Sharp, pinching, or radiating pain is not, at any number, and that set ends immediately.
• Within an hour after: it should settle back roughly to where it was before you started.
• The next morning: the most honest signal. If you wake up worse, the last session was too much. Not a disaster, just information. Repeat that session at 80 percent rather than progressing.

Soreness or pain

Soreness is diffuse, symmetrical, arrives 12 to 48 hours later, and eases when you move. Pain from the injured area is local, sharper, and often worst first thing. Soreness means you trained. Pain means adjust.

Work around it, not through it

An injured knee is not a reason to stop training. It is a reason to change five variables around the knee while continuing to train everything else, in roughly this order of how much they change:

• Range of motion. Shorten it to the part that is comfortable. A squat to a box at a comfortable depth is a real exercise. So is a press that stops short of the range that pinches.
• Load. Obvious, and often the smallest lever of the five.
• Tempo. Slower, controlled repetitions at a lighter load produce real work with far less peak force. Isometrics, holding a position instead of moving, are often available when movement is not.
• Implement and angle. Dumbbells instead of a barbell, a machine instead of free weights, a neutral grip instead of pronated, a trap bar instead of a straight bar. Small changes in the line of force change what a joint feels.
• The pattern itself. If hinging is out, single-leg work may be in. If overhead is out, incline and horizontal pressing usually are not.

Meanwhile, keep training everything unaffected, at full effort. This is not consolation work. Keeping the rest of your body strong shortens the comeback, keeps the habit alive, and does more for your morale than resting and waiting. An ankle injury is a great time to have the best upper body months of your year.

Rebuild volume before intensity

This is the sequencing rule that prevents most second injuries, and the one most often reversed. Volume means sets and total work. Intensity means how heavy relative to your maximum. Rebuild the first, then the second, and do not chase both in the same block.

• Weeks 1 to 2: re-introduce the movements at around half your old load, 2 to 3 sets of 8 to 12, effort well short of hard. You are establishing tolerance.
• Weeks 3 to 6: add sets and exercises, not weight. Go from 2 sets to 4, from three movements to five. Loads creep up only as far as they need to for the reps to feel like work at all.
• Weeks 6 to 10: now start adding load, in small increments, on the movements that have been quiet for several weeks. Reps come down toward 6 to 8. Keep effort a couple of reps short of failure.
• Beyond that: heavier work, and eventually speed and power if your sport needs it. Explosive work goes last, always, because it produces the highest forces with the least control.

Two constraints, and one thing not to do

Two constraints while you rebuild: increase total weekly work by roughly 10 percent a week rather than in jumps, and take an easier week every third or fourth week even though you feel fine. And do not test your old max. There is nothing to learn from it and a lot to lose. It will come back on its own if you keep showing up.

Two failure modes are worth naming. One is feeling good on Monday and doing a full old-program session. The other is stopping the moment it stops hurting; the absence of pain is not restored strength, and the gap between the two is where re-injury lives.

How to tell a coach about a limitation

Whether the coach is a person or an app, what you get back depends almost entirely on how specifically you describe the constraint. "I have a bad shoulder" gets you a generic plan. Give it four things instead:

• What and when. "Left shoulder, impingement diagnosed in April, six weeks of physio, cleared for strength training two weeks ago."
• What provokes it. Name the movement, the direction, and the point in the range. "Overhead pressing hurts past about eye level. Bench press is fine."
• What you have been cleared for and what you have not, including anything explicitly forbidden.
• What you want the plan to do about it. "Keep everything else at full effort, work around the shoulder, reintroduce overhead work slowly in about a month."

Then update it as things change, in both directions. A limitation you got past a month ago keeps shaping your plan until you say it is gone.

How Let's Gooo helps with this

Let's Gooo is an iPhone app where you build your strength training by talking to a coach named Carlos. Two parts of it are genuinely useful during a comeback:

• The limitation is something you say, not something you have to design around yourself. Tell Carlos what happened, what provokes it, and what you have been cleared for, and he builds the plan around it: different ranges, different implements, the rest of your body at full effort. When it changes, you tell him and he reshapes it. You always have the final say on what he changes.
• The history is there. Every set, rep, and weight you log is kept, and he reasons over it when suggesting a load and explains why: you did 135 for 8 at a manageable effort last week, so try 140. During a rebuild, when the increments are small and the timeline is long, having the record rather than a memory is most of the battle.

What it is not: not a rehab program, not a clinician, and it does not diagnose anything. Carlos cannot tell you whether your shoulder is ready for overhead work. What he can do is build training that respects the boundary you and your clinician set, and adjust it as that boundary moves.