Recovery from hamstring pull: week 6
I’m writing and publishing my (rather raw) notes on hamstring pull recovery. I hope by taking detailed notes, I can swing my own recovery towards success. And I hope the techniques, thinking patterns, and simply the story might inspire others battling against chronic physical injuries.
Notes from previous weeks: week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5.
Week 6
Monday (2nd of July), I came with an adductor tightness (4/10). Fabienne did a massage of the trapezius muscle, back, and neck. We checked the sensitivity of my right arm that I felt was weakened recently. No conclusions found.
Tuesday. PT (Fabienne): weight training. We did lots of squats, sumo squats, and lunges. At the end of the training, I felt beaten and great. I had almost no adductor tension.
Wednesday. PT (Luca): eye and inner ear tests. We were curious if my vision or balance is affected in any way. We found some small vision problems: an eye movement in certain directions would make my gait a bit worse. I received some take-home exercises for the vision.
Swam for 500m. I crashed to bed dead tired from yesterday’s training. My glutes were really sore.
Thursday. Came to PT with a strong tightness high up in my adductor and hamstring. Sadly, this is a reaction to my Tuesday’s training. Fabienne did a deep massage of muscles that helped with the tension. We then did balance exercises on an unstable, hanging (on springs) platform with a rotation. Specifically, I was standing on one leg and rotating 90 degrees, the direction of the medicine ball I caught and thrown back to Fabienne. We finished off with morphing TRX planks into TRX pike.
Friday. PT (Fabienne) was focused on massage to ease the adductor tightness. The massage helped a fair amount. I forgot to take more detailed notes that day.
Saturday. I did a 15km (1000m elevation gain) hike near Lake Lucerne. The hike was out-of-this-world beautiful. My leg was feeling ok going up; the adductor tightness was at 2/10. Going down, I had pain in the area where the quad muscle attaches itself to the bone (above the knee). Overall, my right leg felt decidedly weaker and less reliable than the left one (the healthy one).
Sunday was the day of rest. My adductor tightness remained at 2/10.
