ACL Surgery Recovery - Week 23 & 24

Welcome to my ACL knee surgery recovery blog where I have been giving week by week updates on my recovery process since my anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction surgery.

If you're new to my blog, check out the blog archive on the left hand side to read through my previous posts.


Week 23 did not see much progress or difference in my workout. Frustrated, i decided to add some additional stretching and massaging to my routine.

If you've been following my blog you'll know that I've developed jumper's knee in my patella tendon after my knee surgery and I've been struggling with it for quite some time. The strength in my knee is improving on a weekly basis but the jumper's knee issue is a tough hurdle to get over. Quadriceps stretches are really suppose to help so I've decided to increase the frequency in which i do these stretches.

This is your basic Quad stretch (above). Grab a hold of your ankle and bring it up behind you. If you're stretching your left side, use your left hand. Right side - right hand. Use the opposite arm for support if need as in the figure above. Then, as the arrow shows, slightly swing your leg, using your hip backwards. Do NOT perform this stretch using your opposite hand. Remember - left leg, left hand, right leg, right hand. Hold the stretch for 30 seconds, repeat 3 times. For those who would like to try more advanced stretches, check the pictures below.

The other thing i started doing more of this week was simple massaging of the patella tendon. Massaging increases blood flow through the tendon. The proper way for you to massage the patella tendon is in a left - right movement in the area where you feel the pain. NOT up and down or in a circular motion. Just left to right.

So now I'm at week 24 post ACL surgery and my therapist decided that right from the start we would try running drills first and she was going to try taping up my knee again before we started. Taping the knee is suppose to help reduce the pain. We had tried it before by it i found in the past it did not help much. Well, this time it was a lot different. I actually made some progress. Very little pain doing forwards and backwards running drills. Then i went to the treadmill and did 1 minute jogs with 30 second intervals of walking in between. Surprisingly no pain. I did this for 8 minutes and could have kept going but my therapist did not want to push it.

So finally some progress to report. I think it was all a combo of the massaging, extra quad stretches and taping up the knee that really helped in the last two weeks. Hopefully, I'll have more progress over the course of the week as i do my daily routines. If my knee holds up, next week, i'll be trying a few more running and cutting type drills at physio which i will report on shortly after.

Thanks for reading my ACL surgery recovery blog. Please feel free to post a comment or question and I'll try to respond.