How To Rehab A Torn Acl Video

The ACL is one of the four major ligaments in this knee, and the most commonly injured. Get tips and advice on health and medical issues in this wellness video.

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Rest
Physical therapy
Strengthen quadriceps

About this Author

Russ Paine is a well-known physical therapist with the Roger Clemens Institute at Memorial Hospital. After getting his degree in physical therapy from Texas Women's University, he trained for several years under David Drez, MD, a renowned surgeon and sports medicine specialist. He has been a rehab consultant for the Houston Rockets, Houston Astros and NASA. He has given hundreds of presentations in his career in the US and abroad, and has published many chapters in text books and papers in peer review journals.

RUSS PAINE: Today, we're going to talk about an anterior cruciate ligament injury which is a devastating injury to an athlete involved in pivoting- or twisting-type of sports. It usually occurs if you come up and land with a twisting motion. And I've got a knee model here to show you the ACL, which is commonly called. It's in the front of the knee in the middle underneath the kneecap. So if we took the kneecap out of the way and you look straight on at the knees, you see the ACL. The anterior cruciate ligament prevents this movement which we call anterior gliding of the tibia on the femur. Okay? So if you have an ACL tear typically you can survive which just straight-ahead activities like running, cycling, swimming, obviously, is not a problem. But any pivoting, twisting sports, you're going to have an issue with. So rehabbing the ACL is something we do for people that are not going to be involved in pivoting or twisting sports. If you're going to be involved in pivoting, twisting sports such as tennis - tennis is a little bit maybe controversial - but skiing, basketball, those types of things, you probably need to get your ACL fixed. And they do an intra-articular reconstruction where they try to reproduce where the ligament is attached. If you're going to rehab an ACL - straighten your leg out, Ross - typically, you'll have swelling in the knees. So swelling is our number one thing we want to get rid of. When you have swelling in your knee, your quadriceps muscle just waste. It kind of melts like butter. It's a reflex inhibition that occurs. So our number one goal is to strengthen the quad. Quad sets, tighten your muscles as hard as you can to force your knee straight. We want to gain motion and strength. Then we progress onto things such as cycling, leg press, and eventually get to transitional movements like plyometrics and jumping straight ahead before we return to sports. And sports, if you're going to return to sports, typically we'll transition you with a knee brace. So that's all we have to say about ACL injuries.

How to Rehab a Torn ACL Video

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