Ask most patients how their recovery is going and they'll tell you about their range of motion — how far they can bend a knee, how high they can raise an arm. It's the easiest thing to feel and the easiest thing to measure with a goniometer. It's also, on its own, a poor predictor of whether someone is actually ready to return to sport.
Range of motion tells you what a joint can physically do in a controlled, unloaded setting. It says almost nothing about whether the surrounding muscles can control that range under the speed and force of actual competition. We've cleared plenty of patients with full range of motion who weren't remotely ready for a cutting drill.
What we weigh alongside it
Strength testing, measured against the uninjured side, tells us whether the tissue can actually produce force through that range. Load tolerance testing — how the joint responds to repeated, sport-specific stress — tells us whether that force holds up over the length of a match, not just a single rep.
None of these numbers matter much in isolation. A patient with full range of motion, adequate strength, but poor load tolerance is still a patient who'll break down in the third quarter. We're not clearing range of motion. We're clearing a pattern across all three.
Why this changes the timeline
Range of motion typically returns faster than strength, and strength typically returns faster than load tolerance. If we clear return to sport off the first number that looks good, we're clearing people early — which is exactly where most of our re-injury cases come from before they ever get to us.
The protocol takes as long as it takes because the slowest of the three numbers sets the pace, not the fastest.