Working with Hamstring Injury

Hello everyone. So along with my GST I have a pretty physical day job doing grocery delivery, part of which involves deep squatting routinely heavy loads and walking them for a bit of distance - sometimes up more stairs than I'd like. Well about a month or so ago I finally overdid it on the job and managed to strain both my hamstrings, and it's put a monkey wrench in my progress. I've made it up to SE4 for lower body but haven't attempted mastery for it yet since, in spite of still progressing, I don't want to overdo it and injure myself further. I've heard Coach say multiple times, roughly speaking, that the one thing he can't abide by is athletes working through injury, but I've seen little progress with my healing so I'm reaching out for advice here on what steps to take.

Thus far my solutions have included not doing the lower body days since reaching SE4, going as far as I can on the stretch series (if the pain is too much I'll stop), Jefferson curls in the morning with 50 lbs for 5 reps (I'm ~160lbs btw), sticking to the Thrive diet but also taking a lot of vitamin C supplements 1-2x/day, taking cold baths every night before bed - typically within 1 hour after the night's workout, trying to be patient at work and divide the loads so I'm not lifting as heavy (hardest thing to do lol). Again it's been over a month and I don't feel like I've made significant healing progress so if there's anything I'm missing then help and advice would be appreciated. It's worth noting that I feel the most pain in the upper hamstrings, where it connects to the glutes.

Thanks guys!

Tyler please note we cannot give medical advice, to get any exact medical advice you will need to see a specialist. I assume you lift the load in the front of your body when carrying groceries - the best way around this if you do not work alone, is to carry the groceries in the back of your body (however you figure it out- i.e. someone loads you up or you load yourself up). For your Jefferson curls, you need to completely reduce the weight to a dowel stick until your strained hamstrings recover. As a golden rule, you MAY NOT do anything that irritates the hamstring, no matter how weird and out of place the irritation movement may be. Consider Sauna instead of cold baths.

Hello Tyler,

You are being a bit of an over achiever in managing to strain both hamstrings at the same time.    

Four weeks is insufficient time for a severe hamstring strain to heal.  More likely you will be looking at 8-12 weeks minimum and that is if you do not continue to reaggravate the injury.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Luke,

Sadly I do my routes alone, so I can't get help back-loading it. Closest I can do it to carry the bags by hand and effectively side-load them. The big thing will be to simply carry less and not live up to my motto of "one trip or no trips" when there's 200+ lbs of groceries - that's what did me in after all. haha So with the Jefferson curls then the aim is to do them without weight but still work through the range of motion as best I can if I'm understanding properly. As for no lower body exercises at all does that include something like hiking a trail or jumping on my mini trampoline or is that simply something that I'm going to need to feel out case-by-case? No access to a sauna anymore sadly so the best I can do is hot baths at night. Ideally I would do the cold/ice baths followed immediately by the heat but it's a lot of water and time, might still be worth it to do it anyway though.

Coach, 

Appreciate the compliment there.  I've got a long history of overtraining via overzealous impatience, and I really did try this time to swallow my pride and do it by the book. What I didn't count on was overdoing it at my day job since I felt great from the training gains, though in retrospect I was probably pushing the stretch series' too hard. Won't happen a second time that's for sure, and knowing the timeline definitely makes me feel better as far as what to expect so thanks for that.

Cheers!

Tyler, that is my preference for sure to do absolutely nothing that irritates your double hamstring whammy injury hahaha. This doesn't mean that you cannot be slightly uncomfortable or do zero activity, which I would never recommend even when injured. The movement, any movement you do, even from unrelated body parts,  will help to flood the injury with blood, growth hormone and nutrition and speed recovery. The trick here is not to aggravate or re-injure yourself - at least this is the way I have approached my own training.