- Playing 4 nights a week - doesn't give your muscles time to heal up. The weaker your muscles are, the more strain is put on your ligaments.
- Quad / Hamstring ratio strength - I never did any exercises (lunges) to build up my hammies. Hamstring's protect your ACL. I never built up the muscles around the knee either. I'm sure my quads were way too strong for my hamstrings.
- Tight Hammies - I never did any stretching and when attemping to touch my toes I was about a 1 foot away from them.
- Turf field + Gaia cleats - locks you into the ground. The gaia ultimate cleats I use are kind of like football cleats and they provide very good grip. However, the turf field I was on sort of locks you in, ie. there's no give. Someone I played with tore their ACL on that field too.
- Age - I was 28 at the time. Apparently when you're 18 the ACL can handle 3000N of force, whereas when you're 30 it drops to anywhere in the low - mid 2000N's.
My 1st Post in 3.5 Years; Almost 5 Years Post-Op
9 years ago
5 comments:
Hi Andrew,
Congratulations on your injury free year. That is great news. I'm Hua, the director of Wellsphere's HealthBlogger Network, a network of over 2,600 of the best health writers on the web (including doctors, nurses, healthy living professionals, and expert patients). I think your blog would be a great addition to the Network, and I'd like to invite you to learn more about it and apply to join at http://www.wellsphere.com/health-blogger. Once approved by our Chief Medical Officer, your posts will be republished on Wellsphere where they will be available to over 5 million monthly visitors who come to the site looking for health information and support. There’s no cost and no extra work for you! The HealthBlogger page (http://www.wellsphere.com/health-blogger) provides details about participation, but if you have any questions please feel free to email me at hua@wellsphere.com.
Best,
Hua
Hi Andrew,
I've been following your blog for a while now. It's been inspirational. I'm scheduled for surgery on September 29th. Every time I read your posts, I think "man, I can't wait till I've reached that milestone post-op".
Your post hit home for me today: I'm 28 and tore my ACL on field turf while wearing the classic speed TD pattern. Although, I partially tore it in March and then completely tore in in April when I jumped back into action way too soon. My partial tear came from a collision.
Thanks for the blog!
Hey Gary!
Good luck with your surgery! I was in the same boat as you in regards to reading blogs before surgery.
Make sure you create one of your own when the time comes!
My specialty was stopping on a dime, too...
My biggest Ultimate pet peeve is people travelling so I always made sure to stop as soon as I caught the disk. I joined a coached league a while back and the coach told me not to go from sprint to dead stop -- had seen too many knees busted that way.
Brushed off the comment and rolled my eyes. About five months later, there I was with a busted knee. I guess I should have taken that advice!
Plus, my leg workouts at the gym were lagging. I'm sure that didn't help, either.
Hah, hindsight's 20-20 I guess. I wouldn't have listened to anyone before the injury either. Lesson learned!
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