Recovery calculator
Return to running calculator
Get the next walk-run session after an injury, gated on the pain your last run produced and on what the following morning felt like. Free, instant, no sign-up.
Coming back is a sequence of decisions, not one session. The coach holds the thread week to week.
The pain gate is the part with evidence behind it
It comes from the pain-monitoring model (Thomeé, Phys Ther 1997, later used by Silbernagel et al., Am J Sports Med 2007 for Achilles tendinopathy). Pain at or under 2/10 during and after running is safe to keep loading through. Three to five is tolerable but not a reason to add anything. Above five is high risk. To that the model adds the rule that carries most of the signal: pain must have settled by the following morning.
Why the next morning matters more than the run
Loaded tissue answers hours later. Tendon and bone in particular report back the next day, so how a run felt is a weaker signal than how the next morning feels. The classic pattern is a session that felt fine and a morning that does not, which is why a morning flare holds progression here even when today's number looks good.
Above 5/10 the answer is a different one, not a smaller one
Handing back a gentler interval at that point would be the calculator equivalent of nodding along. The honest output is that the plan is not working and the injury needs assessing, so no session is prescribed at all. Weeks since the injury does one job here and only one: noticing that pain is still above the safe ceiling three months on, which is a signal to get reassessed rather than to keep working the ladder.
The ladder is a structure, not a protocol
Be clear about what this table is. No walk-run progression has a primary citation for its particular numbers — the versions handed out in clinics differ from each other, and none has been trialled against another. What is shared across all of them, and what this one encodes, is the shape: hold the session at thirty minutes, convert walking into running gradually, and change one thing at a time. Running minutes go 6, 12, 18, 24, 27, 30, every stage is the same easy effort, and nothing here asks anyone to run faster. Progression is gated on symptoms rather than the calendar, because tissue does not heal on a schedule you can read off a form, and a table mapping weeks to stages would be the least defensible thing on this page.
The 10% rule, with its caveat
The familiar ten-percent-a-week increase governs weekly volume once you are running continuously, and it is a convention rather than a validated protective rule. The randomised trial that tested it (Buist et al., Am J Sports Med 2008;36:33-39) gave novice runners a graded 10%-per-week programme and found the same injury rate as the standard programme. It is a reasonable default for ordering your decisions; it is not a guarantee. It also does not govern the early stages here — stage one to stage two doubles the running, and six minutes is a small enough absolute dose that a percentage is the wrong unit for it.
How often to run the ladder
Every other day, not daily. The rest day is doing work — connective tissue adapts to load more slowly than muscle does, and the soreness or swelling that decides whether you repeat a stage or move up often does not show until the following morning. Running on consecutive days removes the signal you are supposed to be reading. Two to three sessions a week is the usual shape while you are on the ladder, with walking, cycling or swimming on the days between if you want the volume. This page does not source that frequency from a trial, because no trial establishes it; it is the interval that lets the pain rule above actually function.