Marcus previously worked as physiotherapist for clubs including Hull Kingston Rovers, Wigan Athletic and Manchester City. That matters less as a credential than as a working knowledge of what each sport actually does to a body, and what a genuine return to it requires.
Rugby league
A collision sport, and the injury pattern reflects it: shoulders and acromioclavicular joints from tackling and landing, knees from contact and from cutting, and hamstrings from repeated sprint efforts. Forwards and backs do not present the same way, and a programme that ignores the difference will return a prop to contact underprepared.
Amateur and semi-professional players are the ones most often let down here — not by poor treatment, but by rehabilitation that stops at “pain-free” rather than continuing to contact-ready. Those are separated by several weeks of work.
Football
Hamstring strains are consistently the most commonly recorded injury in professional football, and the pattern holds in the amateur game. Groin and adductor problems, ankle sprains and knee ligament injuries make up most of the rest.
Two things determine whether a hamstring comes back or recurs: whether eccentric strength was genuinely rebuilt rather than assumed, and whether sprint exposure was reintroduced gradually instead of in one Sunday morning. Re-injury rates are high in this group precisely because the second one gets skipped.
Running
The largest group of amateur athletes in Bolton, and the one whose injuries are most often a training-load problem wearing a structural disguise. Achilles tendinopathy, patellofemoral pain, medial tibial stress syndrome and plantar heel pain dominate, and behind most of them sits a change in volume, intensity, surface or footwear in the preceding weeks.
Which is why the assessment asks what your training looked like a month ago, not just where it hurts now. Bolton runners get a particular version of this — the climbs at Rivington and Winter Hill load calves and Achilles very differently from flat road miles, and switching between them abruptly is a common trigger.
Gym and strength training
Shoulders from overhead pressing, lower backs from deadlifting and squatting, elbows and wrists from volume. Usually technique or progression rather than anything structurally wrong, and usually fixable without stopping training altogether — which is what most people are actually worried about when they book.
