Stay healthy enough to keep training

There's an old coaching line: the best ability is availability. The athlete who trains consistently for a year will nearly always beat the more talented one who spends four months of it injured.

Most sports injuries aren't bad luck. Overuse injuries in particular (shin splints, tendon pain, stress reactions) tend to follow a pattern. Training load jumps faster than the body can adapt, recovery falls behind, and a tissue that was coping finally stops coping.

This lane explains that pattern for the injuries we see most often, and what you can do about each one. We stick to what the research supports: gradual loading, strength work and sensible return-to-play plans, rather than gadgets and quick fixes.

We also cover the everyday side of recovery: sleep, rest days, mobility, and how to tell normal training soreness from pain that needs attention. None of it replaces a physiotherapist or doctor who can examine you. It should help you ask them better questions, and help you understand the answers.

A practical note. If you're reading this because something hurts right now, check the red-flag list in each guide first. Some symptoms need a professional quickly, and no article should talk you out of that.

Every athlete hurts sometimes. The skill is knowing which aches to train through, which to train around and which to stop for. Here's a rough way to sort them.

Normal training soreness (often called DOMS) is a dull, achy feeling in the muscles you worked, usually peaking one to two days after a hard or unfamiliar session. It affects both sides roughly equally, eases as you warm up and fades within three or four days. You can train through it, preferably with something easy.

A niggle is more specific. One spot, one side, often a tendon or the edge of a bone. It might hurt at the start of a session and ease off, then come back afterwards. This is the stage where small changes (less volume, softer surfaces, fewer hills, a few days of cross-training) usually sort things out within a couple of weeks.

An injury changes how you move. You limp, you can't put full weight through it, or the pain gets worse as you keep going rather than easing off. Pain at night or at rest, swelling, bruising and pinpoint tenderness on a bone all belong in this group. Stop training that body part and get it assessed.

A simple traffic-light rule many physiotherapists use during rehab: pain up to about 2 out of 10 during exercise is green, 3 to 5 is amber (carry on carefully, but don't increase load), and above 5 is red (stop). Check again the next morning. If you're worse than the morning before, the previous day was too much.

When in doubt, get it looked at early. A week of modified training for a niggle is far better than two months off for an injury you trained through.