How to Rehab a Total Achilles Rupture

Video Transcript

RUSS PAINE: Today we're going to talk about total Achilles tendon rupture. If you have this injury you will know that something bad has happened to your lower leg, so it's not a questionable diagnosis. You can see the Achilles tendon here and it attaches to your heel, comes up and blends in to create your calf muscle, so it's a musculotendinous junction here, and typically the Achilles tendon tear is right down here, anywhere between here and the muscle transition area. So typically what people say is that when they have this injury they feel like someone came and hit them with a baseball bat in the back of the Achilles tendon and they hear a loud pop and sometimes you can hear that happen also. This is not something that you can put some ice on it and rehab it. This typically requires surgery to fix a complete Achilles tendon rupture. Some people believe that if you immobilize the extremity the scar tissue can heal this area but, again, that's advice that you have to get it from your orthopedic surgeon. So rehabilitating this problem after surgery or after six, eight or even longer immobilization is gradually restoring the range of motion to the calf. The one thing you don't want to do after an Achilles tendon rupture repair is to stretch your calf muscle, we want that to naturally come, so we do some very gentle act of a contracting of the calf muscle and gradually let this occur and let your range of motion come back, let your strength come back, and probably transition to running may not happen for four to five months postop; sometimes three months if things are going well. Full recovery from this is anywhere from six months to a year. So that's a wrap up on Achilles tendon ruptures.