There is no drill for coming back after a week away

Athletes return from illness, exams or a holiday and rejoin full training on a Tuesday with no plan.

Somebody misses eight days with a chest infection, feels better on the Monday, and is in the middle of a full contact session on the Tuesday because that is what was on the schedule. No ramp, no adjustment, no conversation beyond a nod. Every club has a detailed protocol for returning from a hamstring tear and nothing at all for returning from a fortnight of nothing.

The gap exists because absence without a diagnosis has no owner. A torn muscle belongs to the medical department and comes with a pathway. A week of flu, a family emergency, a holiday, an exam period, a suspension, an international trip with no training on it, all of these produce a genuinely detrained athlete who arrives back through the front door rather than the treatment room, and the front door has no process attached.

What makes it worse is the athlete's own incentive. Somebody coming back after a week out wants to prove they are fine, especially if selection is close, so they will hide fatigue and go harder than they should on the first day. Left alone, they self select into the most intense possible re-entry.

A re-entry plan does not need to be elaborate. One session at reduced volume with the same content, so they are involved and learning without doing the full load. A rule that the first hard effort day comes after a normal day, not before it. A short conversation about what actually happened during the week away, because eight days of a viral illness and eight days on a beach are not the same problem and should not receive the same answer.

The one I would protect hardest is the return after illness, where athletes commonly feel recovered several days before their capacity is back and coaches read the resulting flatness as a lack of condition and prescribe more running.

There is also a scheduling detail worth naming. Most absences end on a Monday because people time their return to the start of the week, which means the returning athlete lands on whatever the Tuesday happens to be. If Tuesday is your hardest day, you have built a system that repeatedly throws detrained athletes into the worst session of the week, and it will keep producing the same injuries until somebody notices the pattern.