Why Spring Is Our Busiest Season for Injuries

The injuries don’t come from a quiet winter. They come from the three weeks afterwards, when everyone tries to make up for it at once.

The first properly warm week always does something to you.

You feel like moving again. The morning walk turns into a jog. The two classes a week become four. Netball season starts up, or you sign up for the fun run, or you just look at the calendar and realise summer is closer than it was. And somewhere in there a quiet plan forms: make up for winter.

Then, two or three weeks later, our clinic gets busy. Sore calves. A grumbling achilles. Shin pain. Lower backs that were perfectly fine in July. The same handful of injuries, over and over, in people who weren’t doing anything wrong except doing all of it at once.

We see this every year. So before you lace up, here’s the thing worth knowing: the injuries of spring aren’t caused by winter. They’re caused by the comeback.

You didn’t lose your fitness. Your tissues lost their practice.

It’s tempting to blame yourself for a quiet couple of months. It felt like everything slipped, and now you’re starting from scratch.

You’re not. What actually happens over a slower winter is more specific than that, and much less personal.

Your muscles hold on to their strength reasonably well. What quietly winds down is your tissue’s tolerance for load. That’s the capacity of your tendons, your calves, your feet and your connective tissue to absorb impact, over and over, without complaint. Tendons in particular are slow to change in both directions. They ease off gradually over a quiet winter, and, importantly, they build back up slowly too.

So on that first big spring session, your enthusiasm and your fitness are ready before your tissues are. Your heart and lungs feel fine. Your legs feel fine while you’re out there. But the achilles that comfortably handled a few runs a week back in autumn has spent three months doing gentle walks, and you’ve just asked it for a long Sunday run.

That isn’t weakness. It’s a gap between what you can do and what you’ve recently prepared to do. Those are two different things, and spring is when the difference shows up.

The injuries we see, and why they cluster

Nearly all of the early-spring presentations come from the same root. Load added faster than tissue can adapt to it. They just appear in whichever link of the chain was least prepared.

Calves and achilles. The most common by a distance. Running and brisk walking load the calf and achilles hard and repeatedly, and it’s one of the slowest structures to recondition. A sudden jump in distance is exactly what it doesn’t want.

Shin pain. Usually the bone and surrounding tissue objecting to a leap in impact before they’ve built the capacity for it. Very common in anyone going from flat winter walks straight into running.

Lower backs and hips. Less about impact, more about volume and unfamiliar positions all returning at once. Heavier sessions, longer time on your feet, movements your body hasn’t done since autumn.

Rolled ankles and tweaks in sport. The first few weeks back on court, when match speed comes back before match fitness and coordination do.

The pattern underneath all of them is the same. It’s rarely the activity that hurts you. It’s the size of the step up.

The one rule that prevents most of it

If you carry one idea into spring, make it this. Build gradually, and let your tissues catch up.

You’ll have heard the “ten percent a week” guideline. Treat it as a spirit rather than a law, because the exact number matters far less than the principle behind it: increase how far, how hard or how often, one at a time, by a modest amount, then give your body a week or so to absorb it before you go up again. Not all three in the same week.

A few practical translations:

• If you’ve been walking and you want to run, start by adding short jogging intervals into the walk. You’ll get there faster than if you head straight out for a continuous run and spend a fortnight recovering from it.
• If you’re going back to a sport, build a couple of weeks of running and change-of-direction work before your first full-speed game, not after it.
• Keep your strength work in alongside the cardio, not instead of it. Strong calves, hips and feet are the reason tissue can tolerate load in the first place. This is the part that quietly gets dropped when everyone rushes to “get the fitness back,” and it’s the part doing the protecting.
• Warm up properly while the mornings are still cold. Cold tissue is stiffer and much less forgiving of a fast start.

None of this means going slowly forever. It means the first three weeks are the ones that decide whether you get a whole season or a setback.

Sore is normal. These aren’t.

Coming back is going to feel like something, and it should. General muscle soreness that turns up a day later and settles within a couple of days is completely normal. That’s your body adapting, and it’s a good sign. You don’t need to be frightened of ordinary stiffness.

What’s worth paying attention to is different:

• Pain that’s sharp, or in one specific spot (a tendon, a point on the shin, one side of your back) rather than spread across a muscle
• Pain that gets worse as the session goes on, instead of warming up and easing off
• Pain that hangs around well beyond a couple of days, or that’s worse each morning after
• A niggle that’s creeping up week to week instead of settling as you get fitter
• Any swelling, or a spot that’s tender when you press on it

Those are the signs that tissue is being loaded faster than it’s adapting. Caught early, nearly all of them need a small adjustment. A week or two of modified load, some targeted strength work, and back into it. Left alone because it’ll probably loosen up, that same niggle is what turns into the injury that costs you the whole season.

Getting ahead of it

If you’re planning a proper ramp-up this spring, whether that’s a return to running, a new season, or simply doing more now the weather has turned, it’s worth being looked at before the niggles start rather than after.

A quick assessment of how your calves, hips and feet are handling load will tell you where your weak link is and how quickly you can safely build. It’s a short appointment, and it’s the difference between a good spring and a whole one.

We’ll meet you where you’re at, and help you build from there.

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