The physio said twelve weeks and I remember thinking that sounded fine. Twelve weeks is a season. I’d done longer breaks than that by accident.
What she didn’t say — what I don’t think they ever say, possibly out of kindness — is that twelve weeks was the timeline for the tissue. The timeline for me was closer to a year, and most of that year had nothing to do with the shoulder at all.
I’ve since talked to enough people about this to know it’s near universal. Torn something. Had surgery. Got ill for three months. Had a baby. Got old enough that a thing started hurting and never fully stopped. The specifics vary wildly and the experience afterwards is almost identical, and it’s an experience that almost nobody prepares you for, because the entire fitness conversation is aimed at people going forwards from zero rather than backwards from somewhere.
Coming back is a different problem from starting. It’s harder in ways that have nothing to do with fitness.
The grief part, which nobody labels as grief
Here’s what caught me off guard: I was sad. Properly, unexpectedly sad, in a way that felt disproportionate to an injured shoulder
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to work out what was happening. I’d lost a thing I did, and the thing I did had quietly become part of how I understood myself. Not in a dramatic way — I was never an athlete, nobody would have described me as sporty — but three times a week for six years builds an identity whether you intend it to or not. And when it stops abruptly, there’s a hole where it was, and the hole has all the standard features: irritability, low mood, a sort of restless flatness, and a very unhelpful running commentary about what you used to be able to do.
If that’s where you are, the useful thing to know is that it’s normal and it’s temporary and it’s not weakness. It’s the ordinary response to losing something you valued. People lose careers and relationships and hobbies and grieve them; there’s no reason a training routine should be exempt just because it seems trivial from the outside.
Naming it helped me more than anything else. Once I stopped treating the low mood as a character failure and started treating it as a predictable response to a loss, it got a lot easier to sit with.
Your old numbers are poison
The single most destructive thing available to a returning person is a training log from before.
I looked at mine constantly. I’d been pressing a certain weight in February and in November I couldn’t do a third of it, and every session became a comparison I lost. That’s an extraordinarily good way to make yourself miserable, and it also makes you do stupid things — because the natural response to being humiliated by a number is to chase the number, and chasing the number is exactly how you get injured a second time.
What eventually worked was starting a fresh log. Not deleting the old one, just closing it and beginning again from a blank page with a new date. It sounds like a gimmick. It absolutely was a gimmick. It also worked, because it changed what “progress” was being measured against — from the person I used to be, to the person who turned up last Tuesday.
The person you used to be isn’t available for comparison anyway. He had a functioning shoulder. He was a different animal. Competing with him is competing with a ghost, and ghosts don’t get tired.
Pain and damage are not the same thing
This is the most practically useful thing I learnt, and I got it from a good physio rather than from anywhere on the internet
The instinctive model most of us carry is that pain equals damage — that if something hurts, something is being harmed, and the correct response is to stop and protect it. That model is right in the acute phase, when something has genuinely just been broken. It becomes actively harmful later.
Because past a certain point, pain is often more about a nervous system that’s become protective than about tissue that’s still injured. A body that’s been hurt turns the alarm sensitivity up. Movements that are perfectly safe start producing warning signals, and if you obey every warning signal you get a spiral: you avoid the movement, the tissue gets weaker and less tolerant, so it hurts more next time, so you avoid it more.
This is called fear-avoidance and it accounts for an enormous amount of long-term dysfunction, particularly with backs. The way out is graded exposure — deliberately, gradually, doing slightly more than feels comfortable, in small doses, and letting the system learn that the movement is safe.
I want to be careful here, because this absolutely is not a licence to train through pain, and getting the distinction wrong is expensive. That’s what a good physiotherapist is for, and it’s the strongest argument for spending money on one rather than a coach or a programme. What they’re actually selling you is the judgement about which pain to respect and which to gently ignore, and that judgement is genuinely hard to make from inside your own body.
Work around it, not through it
The default assumption when something’s injured is that training is off. All of it, until further notice.
That’s almost never true, and it’s a costly error, because the deconditioning that happens during a full stop is often worse than the original injury and it affects everything
Broke your wrist? Your legs are fine. Train them. Dodgy knee? Almost the entire upper body is available. Shoulder out of action? Walk, cycle, do single-arm work on the other side — there’s even reasonable evidence that training one limb produces some strength retention in the untrained one, via the nervous system, which is one of the odder findings in the field and a genuinely useful one when half of you is in a sling.
Do something. The goal during a layoff isn’t progress. It’s holding on to as much as possible so that the way back is shorter, and — this matters just as much — keeping the habit alive so you don’t have to rebuild it from scratch on top of everything else.
The people who come back fastest are almost always the ones who never fully stopped going.
Go slower than you think, then slower than that
Every returning person makes the same mistake, and I made it twice.
You feel good. Three weeks in, the sessions are going well, everything’s moving, and the obvious conclusion is that you can accelerate. So you add weight, add sessions, add intensity — and about ten days later something flares up and you’re back at the start, only now demoralised as well.
The reason it happens is a mismatch in how fast different tissues recover. Muscle strength comes back quickly — the neural adaptations are still there, sitting in storage, and they return much faster than they were originally built. Tendons, ligaments and connective tissue rebuild far more slowly. So you get a window where your muscles can generate more force than your connective tissue is ready to transmit, and your capability feels well ahead of your durability.
That window is where re-injuries live.
The only real defence is to make progression boring on purpose. Add less than you could. Extend the ramp beyond the point where it feels necessary. When you feel ready to jump, don’t — take one more week at the current level. It’s frustrating and it’s the difference between a clean return and a stop-start year.
The comeback builds things the original never did
Here’s the part I didn’t expect, and the reason I’d almost say the injury was worth it — a sentence I’d have found insufferable at the time, so ignore it if you’re in the thick of things.
