Unfortunately, sports hernia is not simple. It is a complex disease.
http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/05/18/sports/doc4a10cc7d31932965317992.txt
My lingering question: Why rehab so intensively if there is no business pressure?
In my own experience with sports hernia it was sometime last summer I happened to notice one day when I went to do some situps, a small pain in my lower abdomen, about an inch or two below my navel with each rep (situp). During that period I was playing pickup basketball about once or twice a week, weather permitting.
I continued to play basketball for about 5 more months, once or twice a week, feeling great. Then I moved across town for a new job and found a great indoor court where games could be easily had every day about 5pm. I was in Heaven.
I started playing twice a week there, then 3,4 time per week. Life was wonderful. I'm 58 yrs-old. I never imagined in my youth that I would be able to play full-court basketball with players in their 20's and 30's -- when I was 58. And I felt great, in shape, and strong. It was when I started playing almost every day in January/February that I finally was hit with a hammer of extreme soreness and descended into the quagmire of sports hernia.
Please keep in mind that all my life my body has been repairing itself each night from all the wear and tear of the day. Like every body, sometimes it would get behind a day or two, but in general it always managed to keep up with repairs. But this past February, I moved beyond a tipping point, to a place where I was playing too hard and too often for my repair-system, and my connective tissue self-repairs were not able to keep up with my high activity level. This resulted in incomplete repairs and damaged connections precisely at the points of my body that were under the greatest stress of all, the tendenous fascia tissues that connect muscles to the pubic bone.
A special place - the Hub of the Body
The pubic bone is the hub of the mechanical body. To it are attached a network of muscles, upward and downward. It acts as the fulcrum for all major body movement. What if we ask the question, What part of the human muscular/skeletal system is subject to the most intense, constant, unremitting and brutal forces? The answer is not the foot, nor the neck, nor the back bone. The answer is the tendonous tissues that attach the muscles to the pubic bone.
In an active person, those tendonous tissues are always repairing themselves from the daily wear and tear of their brutal position. But they have a finite capacity for repair per day. They can do only so much healing in a day, only so much healing in a week. When the athlete is a 58 yr-old playing full court basketball every day, the wear and tear of a week exceeds the finite weekly healing capacity of the tissues, and bang, the tissues are repaired erroneously and the whole pelvic musculature loses its structural integrity, and the body sends the pelvic area into an inflammatory state as a last ditch effort to gain extensive time for repairs to the now highly damaged connectors.
As I read this huge LetsRun thread I see the same mental behavior in other people. We push and push and push ourselves. Why did I play every day? It wasn't a sacrifice, or bravery, or anything like that. It was an addiction to the pleasure of playing.
If I get sports hernia surgery, I intend to avoid the pattern I see here at this LetsRun thread of push, push, pushing to rehab every day. I intend to rehab only every 2nd or 3rd day at the most, and to listen to pain.
I can understand the money dynamics for a professional player driving them to rehab hard, although they risk their body for money that way, it seems to me.
But for the rest of us sports hernia sufferers, I have seen no compelling logic or reason for not giving the body time to heal itself from surgery.
Look at the article in the first paragraph above. Why is that happening?
What am I missing?
Surf