How Long Should You Wait To Train After Surgery?
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August 7, 2025
One of the arguments for not moving immediately after surgery, like needing to take four weeks or six weeks before you actually start to move the affected area, is that we don't want to detach the surgery or the area that's been reconnected or that's been connected.
And I completely understand where that's coming from, but at the same time, what we can look at is that if that part has been attached to you, you now have sensory information that you're getting from that area. Literally like so, if you move that area, you're going to feel what's happening in that area. And if you're doing something where it's going to pull what's been attached up or pull what's attached off, you're going to feel that. That is not going to feel good.
It's not like that attachment site has absolutely no sensation, no feeling. Like you have sensors, you have this ability to sense and feel what's going on in all different parts of your body and all different tissues of your body.
It's not like after a surgery, you just lose all access to that. So what we can do is instead of just completely ignoring any type of movement, we can use that sensory feedback to guide how much we do because an important reason for this is because, like your body adapts, just like your body adapts to actual stimulus, your body will also adapt to no stimulus. So, if you don't do anything, your body's going to adapt to that in the same way.
Where if you do too much, your body's also going to adapt to that in a bad way. So, when we're looking at those situations or scenarios where we've just had something that's reattached, we don't want to not do anything because your body's going to adapt to that, but we also don't want to do too much because your body is also going to adapt to that in a bad way, right?
So we want to find that middle ground. Like, okay, we can feel what's going on there. We use that to determine how much we do. And that is going to be most beneficial versus doing too much or doing too little.