22/04/2026
I tell all my clients.. the symptoms are EXPECTED.
The symptom behavior actually tells us the best story about your recovery process and therefore we shouldn’t try to “prevent” it! The more we can normalize symptoms and educate our athletes what’s actually happening in their bodies… They get better faster. ‼️
Not because you “healed them quickly”. Not because we did one magic exercise or had one PT session, expecting zero discomfort with training again.
The first thing to change when you’re going through the rehab process is NOT your strength. It’s not your mobility. It’s not your tissues healing back to 100%…— it’s your nervous system! ⚡️
All those other things are developing behind the scenes over time, but the FIRST change happens in the nervous system.
At the local level ➡️ inflammation drops, and nociceptive signaling decreases. The area becomes less sensitive at a physiological, cellular level. But healing is still in progress, so those tissues remain responsive to load and movement. They need time to adapt and recover, so some soreness or discomfort can still show up as part of that adaptation process.
At the systemic level ➡️ the body shifts more toward a parasympathetic state, allowing the nervous system to downregulate and recover more effectively. The brain starts to reinterpret movement with more positive associations. Higher-level cortical processing changes too, meaning the central nervous system is responding in a more efficient and less protective way overall.
So, if I prescribe a training session, It’s often a mix of movement variations of better tolerance (I.e a new squat variation, but with CUES and coaching through new and improved patterns), as well as accessories and mobility to address any areas we need better load capacity. If they tell me they had symptoms (I.e 3/10, recovers within 24-48hrs), I tell them GREAT! 👍🏼 Keep going.
Symptoms higher than that or that last a long time may tell me I need to adjust volume, load, or ROM in what I’m doing, but NOT that they regressed, WON’T improve, or that the movements are “bad” for them.
It’s all a NORMAL part of the body lear
