Howdy,
Sorry to hear about your recent injury. Having injured my adductor in the past, I can understand the frustration. Sounds like you’re recovering well, but now have some questions about the rehab process.
Some good news first, and then the thing I’d actually have you focus on, which isn’t injury-specific.
It seems like you’re getting very good care. Complete proximal adductor longus avulsions are usually managed without surgery, even in includes high-level athletes (NFL). It’s also a great sign that you’re deadlifting pain-free, the bruising and most of the pain are gone at four weeks, and you can tolerate some bodyweight squats. That’s great!
From my perspective, I’m not sure the two-month restriction makes sense. I wouldn’t frame this as me overruling your PT and this isn’t medical advice, but I do think it’s worth having a conversation with them instead. Ask what the two months is specifically protecting against in your specific case. In my experience, training to tolerance with a conservative slant with regard to loading and volume is reasonable. If I were you, I would have the conversation with your care team and come to a shared decision. At the end of the day, taking two months off squatting isn’t going to make a difference in how strong you are in the long run, but I can understand wanting to train how you prefer.
Now, for what I think your real focus should be, because I think it’s the biggest factor for your long-term success and injury risk. The SSLP progression you’re running, adding five pounds three times a week, isn’t sustainable and isn’t really a picture of you getting stronger week to week. Almost nobody, not even a true beginner, adds meaningful absolute strength that fast on that schedule. What’s actually happening is that you add five pounds because the model tells you to rather than an actual increase in strength. A real increase in strength is being able to lift more weight for the same amount of reps, using the same range of motion, at the same effort level. In other words, if you add five pounds to the bar and it moves slower, is harder, or you do less reps, that’s not an increase in strength. It’s just harder, and harder isn’t necessarily better. We get stronger and add weight, not the reverse.
I think most people who run this type of program experience early success and get attached to the method. However, I think most of that success is an artifact of the method itself. Most people start with a weight that’s much lighter than their current strength level. In your case, you may have started this program at 225 x 5 x 3, which was not hard for you. Each week, you add weight a few times, but during all of this stretch, the weight is still light for you. It’s probably not light enough to be under-training from a strength perspective (~65% 1RM), but it’s not maximal so you actually have a shot at recovering. Then, you start getting closer to your actual strength level, where each set is very hard and you’re grinding maximal sets three times a week. Those sets still make you stronger, but not proportionally more than the lighter sets, and they’re much harder to recover from than. This is one factor that drives both reduced progress and injury risk.
The fix is two-fold:
- Match the weight on the bar to your strength level on a given day. Almost all of your sets should be submaximal. For strength work, you should be able to do ~2-4 more reps at the end of each set. For isolation and hypertrophy focused work, you should be able to do ~0-3 more reps at the end of each set. Going to closer to failure for strength work generally works worse for strength gain. Because strength levels vary greatly day to day, we should use autoregulation (RPE, RIR, VBT) to select the weights. Some days you’ll add weight, some days you’ll take weight off. That’s the way it goes.
- Vary the exercises we do in order to develop physical proficiency across a wide range of tasks. This may seem counterintuitive, but doing the same exercise over and over again to the exclusion of other variants does seem to compromise development and increase risk of over use injuries. In your scenario, I would consider a regular back squat on day 1, split squats using a different rep range on day 2, and paused squats on day 3, again using a different rep range. This helps build strength in different positions, many of which transfer over to the regular squat.
Let me know what you think. If you need specific guidance to supplement your PT, our coaching staff would be happy to work with you.
-Jordan
Further reading
-Jordan
. Before my injury I was running an intermediate style HLM program with good results. I still benched, overhead pressed and deadlifted while injured. My bench e1RM ~ 275, deadlift e1RM ~ 500, OHP e1RM ~ 190. My squat e1RM was ~ 385-395 prior to injury. I was squatting 355x3x1 and then back off sets at 340x3x4 when I got injured. My concern is my bench, deadlift, OHP are at an intermediate strength level where my squat is now at a novice level. Is there a suitable BBM template for my situation?