Propel Fitness Journal, Issue 076
Someone reached out this week wanting to try physio for one week.
One week — to decide whether it would work.
They’d been injured for five months.
I was physio number seven.
Do the Math on Their Week
They wanted to keep training straight through it.
CrossFit six days a week.
Olympic lifting three.
Running twice.
Eleven sessions a week, five months into an injury that would not resolve.
Then one week of physio layered on top of all of it, to see if it “worked.”
Nobody fixes that in a week.
Nobody fixes it in three months at that volume.
Six Trials, No Data
Every physio before me got the same thing. A short trial. A few weeks, sometimes less. Then on to the next.
A plan needs long enough to actually raise your tissue’s tolerance before you can read the result.
Weeks of consistent, appropriate load. Not days.
Drop it early and you never find out what it could have done.
Six times over, they never found out.
An approach they walked away from in a week was never an approach that failed them. It was one they refused to run.
The Load Was Always the Problem
You can’t out-rehab the exact load driving the injury.
Reduce the dose, and the tissue finally gets a window to adapt.
That window is the entire point.
At eleven sessions a week, the window never opens.
Nobody told them to stop lifting.
Modify the dose. Protect the window. Keep training inside it.
That’s a smaller ask than another five months of this.
What They Actually Wanted
They said they wanted to get better.
But better was going to cost them something. Some volume. Some patience. A real commitment to one plan long enough to read it.
They weren’t willing to spend any of it.
Wanting the outcome and refusing the conditions that produce it are two different things.
The injury lasting five months was never a mystery.
It was the math.
Load versus capacity is the whole game here.
Their load was eleven sessions a week.
Their capacity had been underwater for five months.
That gap was never going to close by switching who was watching it.
I broke down how to audit both sides — and find the gap — in this 90sec video:
– Dan
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