SO I tore a MCL & ACL. No surgery,but rest. How’s PT & recovery look like ?
BTW - I get what your saying,but I can drag a lot of positives from where The Rams & Mattew Stafford are at.
So, after surgery there was about a month of couch time before I was cleared for PT.
PT was pretty tough in the beginning. The first portion is just working on very simple things you take for granted. Each day would start with laying on the table and pointing my toes to my nose, then pointing them as far down as I could, then side to side. Then I’d write the alphabet with my feet. Basically, just trying to stretch that tendon out and get some range of motion back. After a few mins of that, they would flatten a hand towel on the ground and with my legs at a 90° angle it was just “pick it up with your toes”. Which I could not do for a bit. That was the initial few weeks. That alone had me sore for two days, then I’d have to do it again.
After that I would still start my session with the stuff above (that became my warm up) and they moved me on to doing calf raises with only 25% effort on my injured side, and some basic heel toe walking. They continued to add more balance type stuff as I progressed. They slowly added in strength building things.
Eventually getting to single leg calf raises. Once I got those, it was full go. I was doing explosive jumping type stuff, ladder drills, leg presses, and eventually full on sprint work. When I got cleared I was back to running a mile without any real soreness. The two to three mile range still gave me a bit of soreness/tightness.
I’m a firefighter, so they really worked on getting me “sport ready,” but there were some aspects that they just couldn’t mimic in PT. My physical therapist had me scheduled to come in the day after each shift for the first month, and she would make me hope on an exercise bike for 5 mins and then would make me lay on the table and would take me through recovery things like calf massages (my favorite) muscle scraping (my least favorite), cupping of the calf (my other least favorite) and cold therapy. After about a month I was done with that.
I was good enough to do everything I was doing, but there is still some obvious strength differences. If I do any unilateral type lifting (split squats, single leg deadlifts etc) I start with my left side, because it sets the pace.
I’m back to playing basketball, snowboarding, sprints, jumping…but Ive noticed it’s the unexpected/unintentional movements that get me. I grew up skateboarding, and still ride from time to time. Some of the time when my weight unexpectedly shifts too far forward (on my injured leg) I’m not prepared and it just brings me down.
