Muscle Tear? Stop Stretching, Start Healing: Your Recovery Guide

Have you ever seen someone at the gym performing hamstring curls, and you suddenly see them grab the back of their thigh in pain? Or maybe you know someone who’s a track sprinter or a basketball player who felt a sharp pain in their leg that caused them to start limping. The next 2-3 days for them likely involve some tenderness in the region, swelling with a pulsating feeling in the region, weakness, and stiffness. Sometimes the natural tendency is to stretch it to address that stiff feeling. But if you think about what happens with a muscle strain or a muscle tear, it involves a disruption of the muscle fibers. If you try to stretch the fibers and place tension that could pull apart the muscle fibers even more, it might feel a bit better in the moment, but it’ll likely feel worse later. 

So what should you do when you experience a muscle tear? 

If this is an injury you had recently, within the past few days, and there’s still visible swelling, try icing and taping it. Compression with a soft-wrap bandage and elevation can also help reduce some of the swelling. If it’s no longer swollen and not extremely sensitive to touch, it may be helpful to try to see if you can find where the muscle tear occurred. Massaging the fibers by pushing together the fibers above and below the site of the tear can help approximate the fiber edges and speed up the rate of healing. After the massage, you can perform a taping technique that helps to maintain the approximation of muscle fiber edges and provides some support to reduce some of the pain you may experience when putting weight on the leg. Here’s a video discussing the massage and taping technique for a calf tear:

Keep in mind that while stretching right after the injury may not be helpful, the introduction of pain-free stretching can be helpful in the early phase of the injury, once the scar tissue has formed, to prevent the scar tissue from stiffening too much.

You also want to consider that during the recovery of a muscle tear, it may be okay to rest initially but you don’t want to be resting for too long because the strength of the affected muscle as well as all of the other muscles in the leg will decrease if you haven’t been using the affected leg as much during your day to day life. To minimize strength loss, starting with pain-free isometrics (sustained holds of muscle activation) can be helpful. As isometrics get easier, you can progress to isotonics (muscle activation with movement). Eventually, this recovery progression will transition to getting the muscles to activate quickly or to perform at a level necessary for you to perform at your prior capacity with no symptoms. 

During this whole process, you (and ideally your physical therapist) will be thinking about why the injury occurred in the first place. Was it an improper warm-up routine? Was it a lack of flexibility in certain muscles? Are certain muscles not doing their fair share, resulting in other muscles straining more to achieve the movement? Maybe it’s the quality of the movement itself that needs work. 

We hope this information helps give you some guidance on navigating a calf tear if you ever experience one. If you would like further guidance on recovery or to optimize your performance in the physical activities you enjoy, we’re here for you.

We heal smarter, not harder.

If your injured muscle could talk, what's the first thing it would say to you?

• 0%"Ouch! What was that?!"
• 0%"Please, no more stretching... for now."
• 0%"Feed me protein!"
• 0%"When can we get back to moving?"

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