Daily Life In The Training Room

Since my injury on my knee, I have been going to the training center each day, which is located at my university. The reason I am doing this even before my surgery is that first you have to be declared ready for surgery with the mobility and flexibility in your knee. So each day I go there, rehab and stretch, I am going to explain more in depth what stuff I am doing and why its being done. To start off each session when I go to the training center, I lay down on one of the medical tables they have and get ready for my daily routines. They set me up by putting me in this set up like this picture shows, which was from today’s session. They elevate my knee, put ice around it, put stimulation pads on it, and wrap it tightly together with a wrap.

The reason they do these certain things to my knee all serves a purpose as I will describe. The first thing they do is elevate your knee, the reason they do this is because it keeps the injured body part elevated above the heart. While this is going on you ice the knee and this will further help reduce swelling. The other thing they do is put stimulation pads around the knee, this contracts the muscle via electrical stimulation, it helps strengthen the affected muscle around the knee. They do this for 20 minutes each day because if you ice for more then 15-20 minutes you could cause further damage to the tissue, including frostbite, by icing for too long.

By doing this it helps me reduce the healing time a little bit each time. After I do the ice and stimulation, they make me do a few stretches. The types of stretches I do are; putting my foot on something a bit higher then the table and make my knee go straight and put my leg off the table making it straight, then bend it to a 45 degree angle or less under the table. Lastly the most painful one I am doing right now is when they put an ankle weight on my ankle and I lay on my stomach with just a bit passed my knee hanging off it. I do this for 10 minutes each day and I say that I definitely really feel the burn while I do this stretch.

This is basically what I have been doing for the last two weeks for rehab. I will do this for another week and a half until my surgery date because the better it is before the easier it is to recover quicker after. I really just want to get the surgery done because I already know the first two months are the worse after getting an ACL surgery. So I just want them to fly by, which I hope they do but that’s life, got to take it one day at a time. Hope you enjoyed hearing what I have been doing for my rehab as of right now.