My wife tore her calf skiing in January. She is just getting back to working out fairly regularly.

It depends on how bad the tear is. If you can move around on it fairly well, it's probably not that bad. If it hurts a bunch or you have fairly limited motion, you need to get in for an evaluation. They'll either do it through physical examination, MRI, or a combination of both.

There's lot of good information on muscle tears online if you spend some time searching.