Week 25 - ACL Surgery Recovery

Welcome to my ACL surgery recovery blog. If you're about to have, or have just had your ACL surgically repaired and are looking to get an idea of what the recovery stage is like, you've come to the right place. One the left hand side of your screen (Scroll down a bit), you'll see a Blog Archive that goes through my personal recovery stage week by week. Hopefully some of you will find this information some what helpful. Its hard to think during the first week or two after knee surgery that you'll ever get your knee back to the condition it was in prior to your surgery but with a lot of hard work and proper direction from a physiotherapist, it is almost certainly possible.

I'm up to week 25 and generally the knee feels pretty good. This past week I've incorporated 3 days of treadmill running into my routine, but only 10 minutes. I will run for 1 minute and walk for 30 seconds and repeat. Yesterday I increased the running to 13 minutes at my physio appointment. My knee is a little sore the next day but not too bad. I still feel the jumper's knee a little bit which is expected. That's not something that goes away quickly apparently. I don't plan on pushing it too much more until the Jumper's knee is not bothering me at all anymore.

I'll go over a new "cutting" drill that I've learned at physio this past week. If you're currently in the post surgery recovery stage, please don't try this unless you've got a medical professionals consent. If you're knee is not at a stage where it's not strong enough to handle these kinds of movementes, you may re-injure it.

This drill is simply called the "H" Drill. I've drawn up a rough diagram below of how it is performed. This drill is great for people who are trying to get back into sports like basketball, soccer, tennis just to name a few sports. It will help your surgically repaired knee get use to quick start & stop running and cuts again.

Line up 2 rows of 3 pylons. Each pylon in each row is about 15 feet apart and the 2 rows are about 20 feet apart from each other.

Step 1 - your starting point at the bottom of the row on the left hand side. Run the full length of the row at a good speed and make a quick stop (2).

Step 2 - run backwards as fast as you can to the middle pylon (3)

Step 3 - from the middle pylon, side shuffle to the right across to the other row's middle pylon (4)

Step 4 - run forwards to the top of the row (5)

Step 5 - now run backwards again all the way to the bottom of the row (6)

Step 6 - run forwards to the middle pylon (7)

Step 7 - from the middle pylon, side shuffle to the left across to the other row's middle pylon (8)

Step 8 - run backwards back to your starting point (9)

Repeat this drill about 5-10 times depending on what recovery level you're at.

That's it for this week. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this blog.

Thanks for reading my ACL Surgery Recovery blog. Be sure to check back next week for another update.

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.