21-24 WEEKS POST OP

You should by now be up and running with no worries, be feeling pretty strong in your legs as you’ve had a really good strength block and hopefully been ticking off some important changes of direction. If this is the case then you can look to progress with the change of direction into some lighter agility work. This is a very important step and can play a pivotal role later in the rehab. This is an opportunity for you to get your footwork and technique even better than pre-injury.

I have learnt and tried over my rehabs to improve my agility through my footwork by staying low with my feet underneath my body, keeping me very centred and in a good strong power position. This is important as it doesn’t allow for you to get into vulnerable positions with your foot placement. Unfortunately you can’t prevent injuries, but a lot of ACL ruptures occur when athletes are in vulnerable positions. With the nature of our game, this is always going to happen but if you can change your technique or patterning by just 1%, which I believe I have, then that could make all the difference. I recommend you do multiple drills demonstrated in the video below, inside and outside cones, over the top of cones, forwards and backwards with as much change of direction that your body can handle.

Once again build this up slowly as you don’t want to stress the knee too much. Sharp changes of direction and agility will usually put a fair amount of stress on your knee joint and so should always be followed up by icing after the session to allow your knee to cool down and recover as best as possible.

This stage is another one where you have to have confidence in what your are doing and should have someone their helping or coaching you through this but ultimately the most confidence you will get will be when you make small progressions from session to session. Technique is very important and should be coached but some advice that helped me was not to overthink it whilst doing the exercise, as at times this can throw you out as you’re not reacting to the movement in a normal way, but instead predicting every move and thus making it unconventional at times. This is also a great time in the rehab to get some really good strength in the gym through squats if they do not give your knee or tendon any issues. If they do, another good alternative is deadlifts and it’s important to really get your vmo back to full strength and then even stronger than pre injury, so the leg extension is one that isolates the quad really well which is illustrated below. This is probably my most important exercise that I currently do pre sessions and games as it activates and switches my quads on.

Squats are a great exercise to do but as mentioned before can cause soreness in the knee depending on a number of factors, so once again it comes back to the individual and how your knee responds, thus changing the exercise to a deadlift is a good substitute.