Before you can move to restore the full range of motion in your knee , you should be able to fully flex your knee and extend it. This knee flexibility is critical towards the restoration of natural knee movement. A full range of motion for your knee is essential in the restoration of control and activation of various leg muscles and ligaments. In particular, you will require full knee extension to contract your quadriceps muscles.
This ensures that you regain your quadriceps muscle power and provides strength to your knee for walking. This first stage also trains you to start walking again using the proper mechanics that will not strain your ACL injuries.
By the end of this stage, your knee should be capable of full extension. This extension is critical for a patient, especially when carrying out many daily chores. Some of the activities that will require full knee extension include putting on your socks or shoes, walking up and downstairs, walking, among others.
A flexible knee will also prepare you for the next stage, which involves strengthening workouts. Mostly, the second stage starts around weeks after surgery. Technically, however, this phase begins after the completion of the first phase. This stage helps you to increase power and balance on your operated leg.
Strength restoration is critical for you to progress to impact sports such as running and jumping. These sports activities require that your muscles be strong enough to handle the loading forces that come with such exercises. Re-strengthening of the hip muscles, ligament, knees, and ankles is critical to avoid re-injuries, especially in cases where your ACL injury undergoes extra strain.
This phase involves a program of workouts that involve steady workout progressions for the patient. Here, you transition from partial squatting to full squatting. With time, you should also be in a position to perform single-leg exercises, which include step-ups and lunges. The one-leg exercise is a challenge for you to control your leg position.
In the process, you end up achieving what we call alignment control. Alignment control prevents your leg from rotating or collapsing inward towards your midline. The other importance of this second phase is that it helps to improve your proprioception. Your body and your brain will need to be in constant communication to help ensure there is balance and stability.
This process is crucial since a sport such as running involves shifting the balance from one leg to the other. For athletes, the body also requires to adjust its stability in a matter of hundredths to tenths of a second. This is essential in producing the power athletes need for propelling themselves forward. Failure to use your leg muscles for stabilizing your body exerts extra pressure on all your ligaments. Lastly, the presence of a meniscus tear and arthritis changes can be important.
What specific treatment is needed for the meniscus can have a large effect. Most meniscus tears cannot be repaired meaning sewn back together. The vast majority of meniscus surgeries involve trimming out the torn part, as the tear configuration and location is such that a repair would not heal.
In theory, removing some of the meniscus, which acts as a shock absorber in the knee, could lead to arthritis changes down the road. Also, the presence of arthritis changes at the time of surgery could suggest that the athlete will have some pain even after he or she has returned to full activity.
As we have talked about in other posts, surgeons can look at the degenerative changes to the articular cartilage and try to smooth them out with a shaver.
But this does not restore them to normal cartilage. While we have some treatments that might help small areas of cartilage damage, we have nothing reliable that reverses more diffuse changes back to normal cartilage. Click here to get started! Recommended Products and Resources Click here to go to Dr. Due to a large number of questions I have received over the years asking about products for health, injuries, performance, and other areas of sports, exercise, work and life, I have created an Amazon Influencer page.
While this information and these products are not intended to treat any specific injury or illness you have, they are products I use personally, have used or have tried, or I have recommended to others. Please note that as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Quick tips for a variety of sports- and exercise-related bone and joint injuries - Learn when those injuries could be serious and what you should do about them. Does the thought of seeing a doctor scare you? Decide if you should see one, find one suited for you and get the most from your visit. If you need more information about your particular injury and options to treat it and recover quickly and safely, talk to me one-on-one!
It means that instead of using the 4-month mark or the 6-month mark for return to running or jumping and cutting, we test our athletes to make sure they can handle the demands for running and jumping. Check here for more details about the infamous 6-month mark after ACL surgery. We do perform an in-depth battery of tests for all of our athletes prior to letting them run or jump to make sure they have the pre-requisite strength and stability.
With all of our athletes, we make sure they have been performing some type of:. The exercises and movements listed above are just a few movements and drills we like to incorporate prior to running. They are not an exhaustive list.
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