Stay in your sport for the next twenty years

Because rest fixes the wrong half of it. Rest takes away the pain and takes your capacity with it.

The pain settles, so you go back to your sport — but the demand is exactly what it was, and you are weaker than you were when you stopped. It flares. Obvious conclusion: rest more. The loop tightens, and each round leaves you with less than the one before.

What sits underneath almost every recurring masters injury is a capacity gap: your sport asks for more than the tissue is currently prepared to give. That gap doesn’t close by waiting. It closes by loading.

It starts with the pattern, not just the flare. Treating this week’s injury without closing the gap that produced it just buys you the next one.

So we look at three things: the injury in front of us, the demands of your sport, and the training history that got you here. Then we build something that handles all three at once.

You keep training the whole way through, modified. Detraining is the enemy — it is what made the last three cycles worse, and there is almost never a good reason to stop entirely. Most masters athletes work with me for six to eight sessions and then keep a check-in cadence through their season.