How do athletes get better so quickly after surgery?
Gold Medal Rehabilitation
The primary reason that patients undergo elective orthopaedic surgery is to return to their pre-injury sports or activities.
After any surgery, there is a period of time when you will be asked to protect the site of surgery against accidental re-injury. This may involve using a cast, a sling, crutches or a splint.
The purpose of protection is to ensure that your surgical repair has a chance to gain enough tensile strength (healing) to take load again without damaging the surgical repair or reconstruction.
Regrettably, this period of protection causes the surrounding muscles to weaken through disuse and for surrounding joints to become stiffer.
As a rule, for every week that you protect an injured tissue, it can take upwards of two weeks of rehab exercise to regain full motion and strength.
For this reason, your surgeon will encourage you to see a physiotherapist to ensure you fully rehabilitate after surgery.
Time is not rehab - doing exercise is rehab.
Just because a rehab program indicates you should be able to something at 6 or 12 weeks, doesn’t mean it will happen without doing exercise. All timelines are based on executing the exercises at each stage in your rehab protocol. If you don’t do the exercises, then it’s unrealistic to expect to meet the timelines in your protocol.
Regrettably some patients fail to finish their rehabilitation, go on to permanently stiff joints and never return to their sports or activities.
Range of Motion is #1
The number one post-operative complication following elective surgery is not regaining full range of motion and ending up with a permanently stiff joint.
Simply put, whatever range of motion you have at 12 weeks post-surgery is likely what you’ll have for the rest of your life.
For these reasons, your surgeon will set up follow up visits to make sure that you’re gaining your range of motion on-schedule.
The schedule of how much motion you should have at a given point in time, depends on the surgeon and the procedure.
The “40 – 60 – 100″ Rule
When patients ask me how professional athletes return to sports so well or so quickly, I tell patients it’s because they spend 2 to 3 hours a day, seven days a week in a gym for months doing their rehab.
This rule may help you to understand how much time you’ll need to exercise in a gym to regain different levels of function.
- To return to work and general activities of daily living, you can expect to spend 40 hours or more doing rehab exercising at home or in a gym.
- To return to recreational sports, you can expect to spend to spend 60 hours or more exercising in a gym.
- To return to your pre-injury level of performance, you can expect to spend 100 hours or more exercising in a gym and regaining your individual skills.
This doesn’t mean you need to see physio every week BUT it does mean you need to be exercising in a gym every week, doing the ‘right’ exercises.
You can expect your surgeon to ask you, “So how many hours a week are you in the gym?”.
Terry Kane has over 25 years of hands on experience in rehabilitating patients post-surgically as well as working with some of the top Orthopaedic surgeons in Canada and the United States.
Terry’s job is to ensure you’re “On-track and On-time” with your range of motion and to design individualized return to work and sports exercise plans based on the surgical procedure and stage of rehab.
Terry has worked with patients who have undergone the procedures listed below and many others;
- Fractures
- Spinal Fusions
- Spinal discectomies and laminectomies
- Ligament reconstructions
- Mensical repairs
- Tendon repairs
- Total joint replacements (Shoulder, Hip, Knee)
- Nerve entrapments
- Osteochondral joint injuries
In 2009 Terry founded OrthopaedicProtocols.com to help surgeons, physicians and physiotherapists access the most current non-surgical and post-surgical rehabilitation protocols.
The library is now the largest online library in the world, containing over 600 protocols & guidelines and is visited by clinicians in over 100 countries.
Connect with Terry