Thanks for reading. Glad I could be of some assistance. Light runs can usually be accomplished without issue a few weeks post-injury, however, as much as people don’t want to stop, the light running can actually make things a bit worse from a motor patterning and activation standpoint. Unless you are really hammering the psoas and glutes with some activation work (generally) as well as considerable soft tissue and ROM work on the adductors and lower hip flexors, you’re just reinforcing the patterning that led to issue in the first place. I wrote a post a while back about returning to running following injury, and would recommend that you try some quicker 60-80m extensive tempo runs in place of most of your easy running and also hammer the appropriate mobility, stability, and strength work in the weight room.

As to yoga and swimming. It depends. Typically, I’m not a huge fan of yoga simply because there is a delicate balance between mobility and hypermobility, and yoga tends to strive for hypermobility in the wrong places. I have noted in many cases of SH in runners that due to a loss of hip range of motion in extension (weak glutes, tight hip flexors), they begin to try to get that extra range by going into external rotation and lumbar rotation. While external rotation is not necessarily a bad thing, it tends to greatly reduce an athlete’s ability to internally rotate the femurs, which is a risk factor for SH injury and recurrence. Swimming can be beneficial to a degree, however, I’ve found that the breast stroke kick to be too much for the adductors, which tend to be really balled up in SH. In a flutter kick, you’re also not getting a whole lot of hip extension ROM and your flexion ROM is too small. Again, if you’re doing the right things outside the pool you can mitigate it, but without the interference of running or swim, you’ll be able to correct things much more quickly and then you can just train to maintain what you’ve achieved. Typically for conditioning purposes, which for a runner with SH (stereotypically he hasn’t had an off-season for the last 10 years) I sometimes may keep at very little, I’ll use high rep medicine ball work, bodyweight circuits, jumping rope, and various barbell combinations or a mix of all the above modes.

Let me know if I can help you any further.

Best regards,
Carson Boddicker

Tom

-CB

Regards,
Carson Boddicker

Yours is the only website I can find that considers living without surgery. I’ve looked and looked for web posts of people with good surgical outcomes, but find only posts of people that had problematic outcomes with surgery. But it’s not in my nature to be attracted to surgery as a solution to such a delicate complex problem anyway.

Anyway, I think I’ll be trying to do it your way. I especially noted your advice about not sitting all day. All of us who use the internet probably do a lot of sitting. Maybe that’s why sports hernia is getting so common these days (merely surmising, of course). An injury that would normally heal becomes chronic with sitting all day..

Thanks very much for a good article that seems to make sense to me.

Tim