An injured hamstring is a symptom with a history. By the time it tears, something has usually been asking too much of it for a while: a hip that does not extend, a pelvis that does not stay level under load, an old ankle sprain three years ago that quietly changed how you push off.
Treat only the hamstring and you get an athlete who is healed and still exactly as likely to tear it again. That is the distinction this work turns on: the injury is the thing that hurts, and it is rarely the thing that is wrong.
Who this is for
Not only competitive athletes. In practice the caseload is amateur athletes, performing artists, and competitive professionals, and the method is the same for all three. What changes is the standard you are returning to. Dancers and musicians tend to arrive with overuse injuries rather than trauma.
The four parts of a program
Assessment. A thorough examination of the injury, and then of everything above and below it. How the whole body moves and where it compensates, because that is where the cause usually is.
Treatment. Manual therapy and therapeutic exercise, together. Hands-on work on the injured structure and on whatever has tightened up around it, alongside Pilates-based loading that progresses as the tissue tolerates it, aimed from the first session at return to sport rather than at absence of pain.
Prevention. Identifying and correcting the movement patterns that were causing the pain or raising the risk. This is the part that decides whether you are back for a season or back for a month.
Education. The tools to manage it yourself: what to load, what to back off, and what an early warning actually feels like. The aim is not to need us indefinitely.
What we see most
Ligament sprains at the hip, knee, ankle, shoulder and elbow. Patellar tendinitis and Achilles tendon injuries. Plantar fasciitis. Rotator cuff injuries. Shin splints. Knee injuries including ACL, MCL, PCL and meniscus tears. Back and neck injuries involving discs or facet joints. And hypermobility, which is less an injury than a context. It changes how everything else on this list should be loaded.
Why the equipment suits this
Spring resistance can be set precisely and can assist as readily as resist, which means loading can start earlier and progress in smaller steps than free weights allow. For an athlete, the value is control: you can load one direction of a movement without loading another, isolate the link in the chain that failed, and rebuild it without asking the healing tissue to carry full bodyweight before it is ready.
The neuromotor side matters as much as the strength side. An American College of Sports Medicine position stand sets out the case for including balance, coordination and agility work in exercise prescription alongside resistance and cardiovascular training, which is exactly the component a strength-only rehab tends to leave out.
When you are actually ready
Pain-free is the floor, not the finish. The questions worth asking before returning are whether the injured side matches the other one under load, whether it holds up when you are tired rather than fresh, and whether you have stopped thinking about it. An athlete who is still protecting a limb is compensating, and compensation is how the next injury starts.
This is the part of rehabilitation with the strongest evidence behind it, and it turns on timing as much as on testing. The Delaware-Oslo ACL cohort study followed 106 athletes returning to pivoting sports after ACL reconstruction and found the re-injury rate fell by 51% for each month return was delayed, up to nine months after surgery. Beyond nine months, waiting longer bought nothing further. More symmetrical quadriceps strength before returning independently lowered the rate as well. Among those who failed the study’s return-to-sport tests, 38% went on to re-injure the knee; among those who passed, 6% did.
Which is the argument for testing rather than guessing, and for treating the calendar as a floor rather than a target.
Or call the studio:+1 415 924 2228San Rafael+41 91 235 14 88Ascona