Firstly directly following the incident the reduction of pain is vital, as pain can lead to an increase in muscle tears and as such the best course of action is to use none steroid based anti-inflammatory medication in conjunction with the RICE acronym of Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation.
Following on from the incident it is important to notice psychological issues, directly after the incident our athlete could immediately show signs of denial which suggests the athlete will claim to be over her injury within a few days as to continue training (which if not careful can worsen the injury) followed by distress such as anger, anxiety and depression from the thought that competing may no longer be within her reach.
Nutrition is equally important, making sure you are consuming enough food to ensure muscles are receiving enough protein for muscle protein synthesis, however a reduced amount of food to normal ensuring no excessive weight is gained. With nutrition its more about eating healthily and avoiding certain foods, as there is no real food that will speed up recovery, just foods that can impede and slow the recovery process down.
With a healthy diet, the athlete can maintain their energy when engaging in stretching and strengthening to decrease their injury time. It is vital an athlete utilises these exercises such as lying hamstring stretch and a standing quadriceps stretch, as well as strengthening exercises such as squats and lunges will allow an athlete to return to a proper training regime and therefore a competitive environment.
The psychological interventions link directly to recovery during rehabilitation in several ways, one particular psychological intervention is simply to education the athlete which makes them aware of the situation. This can be coupled with both the nutritional and physiological rehabilitation stations in the sense that if our athlete has a certain level of education to know to, for example, going to bed hypo-hydrated will disturb the athlete’s sleep (which is where the majority of the recovery occurs) however if the athlete is given this knowledge she is more likely to pre-hydrate before sleeping. Additionally from a physiological point of view hot packs are a useful form of pain relief, lessens muscle spasms and escalates superficial circulation by raising the temperature in the superficial structures but not deep tissue. If the athlete knows this she is more likely to take the effort to apply heat patches when she can.
Finally once the athlete is fully recovered personal training plays an important part in increasing the athletes sprint time. Supramaximal training, for example, can increase sprinting velocity by 7.7%. A long with other training methods and certain exercises (i.e. Jump Squats) can detract from a sprinters 100m time. All of these are important aspects a personal trainer will assess and use in his programme for any sprinter.