Return to play: the stoplight system

When can I play again? Honest answer: when you pass the tests, not when the calendar says so. Every return-to-play guide on this site runs on the same three-color system, red, amber, green, where each stage is earned by what your body can demonstrate, and a bad response to play sends you back a stage instead of into a setback spiral.

The framework is not decoration. Sports medicine consensus treats return to sport as a staged continuum guided by criteria rather than dates, because pain settling down is not the same thing as tissue being ready for sport^[1]. Want a first read on where you stand right now? The readiness check takes two minutes.

Red is not a punishment; it is triage. A joint that will not bear weight, a pop you heard, swelling that arrived within hours, night pain that keeps climbing: those need answers before they need drills. Guessing in red is the expensive move, because playing on an undiagnosed injury is how a two week problem buys a two month extension, and how a torn tendon becomes a re-torn one.

Amber is where recoveries are won. It means specific yes-lists and no-lists, stationary dinks yes, lateral scrambles no, that kind of specificity, plus session caps and the discipline to stop while things feel boring. Each injury's guide spells out exactly what amber allows for that body part, because an amber ankle and an amber elbow live very different lives.

Green is earned with objective markers, balance times, symmetry tests, pain-free movement at speed, and it comes with structure: doubles before singles, short sessions before long ones, open play before tournaments. What green does not promise is immunity. The setback rules keep running, and a bad response to play still steps you back a color.

How to use these guides

Read your injury's page first, because staging a problem you have not identified is guessing with extra steps. Then locate yourself honestly in the guide, do the stage's homework, and retest weekly rather than daily; tissue changes on a weekly clock, and daily testing just farms frustration. When a test passes two sessions in a row, take the next stage. When one fails, the guide tells you exactly what to do, which is the entire point of having stages.

Three rules never change across any guide. The warm up is permanent, not a stage. The next-morning review outranks how the session felt. And every guide shares the same setback rule: pain that is still up more than a day after play sends you back a stage, no negotiations, no exceptions for tournament weekends.

Why criteria beat dates

Two players with the same sprain heal on different clocks; a date treats them identically and gets at least one of them wrong. Criteria adjust automatically. The consensus literature is blunt that returning on pain resolution alone, without demonstrated capacity, is how re-injuries happen^[1], and it frames return to sport as a continuum, from returning to participation, to returning to your sport, to returning to performance, rather than a single cleared-or-not verdict.

The motivating example lives one tendon down: in the published pickleball Achilles rupture series, 68%^[2] of the ruptures struck within the player's first month in the sport, the exact window where enthusiasm outruns tissue. Read the full story on the Achilles page. The stoplight exists to keep your comeback out of that statistic.

The mistakes that reset comebacks

Three patterns account for most of the setbacks that walk back into clinics. The tournament exception: a player holds their stage faithfully for weeks, then a bracket weekend arrives and amber quietly becomes green because the entry fee was paid. Stages do not read calendars or brackets.

The good-day promotion: one pain-free session gets treated as a clearance instead of a data point. Stages are earned by tests passed on multiple days, because tissue that tolerates Tuesday still has to prove Thursday.

And the silent skip: a player passes red and amber honestly, then skips the structured first weeks of green and re-enters at full tournament intensity. The last stage has structure for the same reason the first ones do; the injury does not know it is supposed to be over.

What CourtReady adds

These guides are the framework, free and general. CourtReady turns the same framework into a personalized, physician-reviewed plan: your injury, your stage, your drills, and your progression markers, built by the clinical team behind this site. The band below joins the list for when plans open.

The five guides