How to handle injury setbacks with your ACL recovery

So I had a little injury setback last week and I wanna talk about it. If you're subscribed to my channel, you know I talk a lot about, about just health things in general, but a lot about ACL surgery, knee health, things I've been doing to help my knee get better after ACL surgery and all that stuff. And I've talked a lot about the progress I've made through using the Knees Over Toes program, which has been absolutely amazing. And definitely check out my other videos on that if you're curious at all what the experience has been like. But I had a little knee setback last week. And I just want to share about what that's been like for me, why that probably happened, and how to cope with setbacks. Because if you've gone through ACL surgery or really any injury as an athlete, you're going to experience setbacks. And it's really, really, really important to know how to handle that both mentally and emotionally. And thankfully, I've had my fair share of setbacks in this whole process, and I've developed a kind of, let's say, method that has really helped me get through it. And not only get through it, but learn from it and recover better next time. So just a quick background on what exactly happened and why I had this setback, or at least why I think I had the setback. Um, so last week I was probably pushing myself a little harder than I should have, and I say that because when you've gone through ACL surgery, or if you've had any kind of injury really, you know that you want to gradually increase load and stress over time, especially when it's a joint. And you don't want to create too much load or overload on the joints. It's going to react. It's not going to like it. So it's very much a gradual buildup. And I can't think that I'm, you know, 18 years old and can go gung-ho and feel completely fine the next day. Like, I have to understand that there's a, there's a little bit more of a recovery process needed as you start to age as an athlete. I'm still learning that. So I was doing some weightlifting, I was also playing some volleyball, and I was lifting a lot heavier than I normally have in a long time, and just more frequency of that too, and was really just enjoying being active in the summertime and, you know, all sorts of things, playing some basketball, all of that. And I think I may have just overdone it because I woke up one day and I started moving around and I noticed, I was like, ooh. My knee does not want to go into extension, and it is feeling like very painful to put it into extension all of a sudden. And it kind of pinged in my mind, I was like, this is a familiar feeling, where's this from? I was like, oh no, I know where this is from. And it actually totally reminded me of the same sensation I had when I was going through Hoffa's fat pad impingement. And I haven't talked a lot about that because it's not a really common thing and there's not too many people that experience that, but I think it does need to be talked about, especially in the ACL community. And I can make a separate video on exactly what what it is and how it happens and all that stuff, but basically there's a fat pad in your knee that ends up getting inflamed a lot when you have ACL surgery because that's when a scope, a scope basically goes through it when they're doing the surgery and it goes right through the fat pad, so it can lead to some scarring and inflammation, and it absorbs a lot of force. So when you overload the knee and the other structures of the knee start to become weaker, like your muscles, maybe they're not fully recovered, the force in the knee starts to become greater, like the knee joint itself starts to take more force, and you start to get inflammation of the different structures in the knee, hence fat pad inflammation and impingement. And I'm saying impingement because that's the, like if you imagine this is the femur and this is the tibia, fat pad's in the center and you walk and it squishes it, it kind of squishes it. It shouldn't squish it, it should be moving out of the way, but when it's swollen, it gets stuck. And if you've ever experienced that, it is a very distinguishing, sharp feeling. It is not comfortable. It's kind of like somebody just kind of taking a knife to the inside of your knee, right between your two bones. And it's like, it's really not a fun feeling whatsoever. So I recognized it right away and I was like, I've experienced this before after my ACL surgery. I know what this is. I've probably overdone it. Let me think back to all the activities I've done and kind of track and see like where this might have happened and where I might have gone wrong, right? So that's part of the learning experience. Number one is being able to track back and be like, what did I do here? What, what flared this up? You might have a sudden moment, right, where it's something like an injury just comes on all of a sudden or gets reactivated. You're like, oh, I know it was that moment I tried to jump off this one foot and I definitely felt that right away. Or it might be something in my case where I woke up the next day and was like, wow, this is feeling way stiffer than it has in a long time. What did I do? Um, how did I aggravate this? And you start to realize, oh man, this might have been like a compounding injury. So really that's part one of trying to move through a setback is understanding where it came from and why it was there. Did I not get enough good sleep? Like that's probably part of it. I wasn't sleeping super well last week either. Was I not eating well? You know, was I overtraining? Yes, it was definitely the overtraining piece. Was I not hydrated enough? Were my other muscles sore and maybe my knee had to compensate for that? And that's actually definitely the case because I had a really good hamstring workout and calf workout. So all the muscles around my knee were very, very, very, very sore prior in the week, and it makes sense that it would add stress to the knee joint, right? So understanding where and why this happened. Okay, point number 2 is knowing when to rest and when to push. Some things you might not have any experience with and you just might need to rest it just to kind of gather some information and data about how your body's gonna heal and react through it. Since this was a recurring injury for me or something that I experienced before in a very, very like— I knew exactly what that sensation was in my knee. I kind of knew how to cope with it, what things to do, what not to do, and I learned from going through it last time like what worked, what didn't work. So I knew that I could push my body in certain ways, meaning I could still do certain things like getting some good synovial fluid to the knee, doing some of the ATG/knees over toes exercises still. But there were certain other ones that I needed to completely avoid. And anything that for me in hyperextension or just extension in general, the knee was a no-go, like just not to irritate it. So you got to make sure you know when to kind of push it, when to rest it, and how to learn that feedback from your body. I think that's really important as well in going through a setback. And of course, if you don't know yourself, talk to a professional about it. Talk to a physical therapist, talk to your doctor about it if you are actually really concerned that this is a serious injury. Um, you know, you probably will know best in terms of the pain feedback you're getting in your body, but I always say talk to a professional if you're not sure if you should push it or rest it. And just to clarify, when I say push it, I'm not meaning like push through the pain. That's like toxic, retire that, we don't want to think about it that way. I'm saying like to move forward, to continue to heal it and work through it, not necessarily push it or aggravate it more. So just wanted to clarify that. And the third thing I do when I experience a setback like this is I remind myself that setbacks are very normal, especially when going through an ACL recovery process. And a lot of people think that by year 1, year 2, year 3, it should be completely normal. But the truth is your knee has changed. The structures in it have literally changed. and it may never feel 100% or pre-injury before. You might be able to get it to a capacity where it can handle 100%, but it might not feel exactly the same, and it's going to react differently again. And that can go for any injury really, but I'm using my example because I got— went through ACL surgery. So I think it's important to normalize that setbacks happen, because I know for myself there's been points where I've experienced like setback after setback after setback where I'm like, Am I falling apart? Like, what is going on? But it's, it's a normal part of the process, and it's all data and feedback to understand your body more. And that goes into my fourth point. If you are able to normalize setbacks, you begin to understand that all setbacks really are is a process of learning your own body, learning your own body's capabilities, learning how to better treat it, how to better recover from workouts, from activities as you continue to move through your injury and then beyond it, right? So I think it's really important to look at it that way and develop that kind of resilience, that mental resilience of understanding that this is all just data. Yeah, it's uncomfortable. I get it. Like, no one wants to experience pain or a re-injury or anything like that. But if you look at it as like, oh, I'm just learning about what went wrong, how can I adjust it next time and how can I recover better so I can be stronger and better and faster and more resilient next time? Great. That's an amazing thing. So sometimes we have to push those boundaries to understand where they are, right? And that's where I think this process is really, really valuable and why I wanted to talk about it in my own real-life example is because I don't think it's talked about enough, is that, you know, mental and physical side to working through a setback. And I just feel like it needs to be normalized more that people do go through setbacks on a normal basis. And it's part of just becoming— or it's part of just being an active person and an athlete in general. Okay, so now that I've kind of gone through the steps of like how to handle a setback, I want to talk to you guys a little bit about the specifics of how I handled my specific setback in terms of the, the actual, like, kind of little healing details that really helped me work through it much faster than I anticipated. Because like I said, I had gone through this kind of Hoffa's fat pad impingement before, and it took a long time for me to figure out what it was and work through it. I have that data now, and I was able to actually resolve it very quickly within the span of 2 to 3 days. And the first thing I did was wear my super handy dandy Incrediwear leg sleeve at night. I've talked about these things in a lot of videos, like a lot of them. And this one I wear at night. So I would wear this just, you know, from 10 p.m. until about like 6 a.m. and be sleeping in it. Super comfortable. If you don't know anything about Incrediwear, I'm going to link the video here. and in the description down below where you can watch my Incrediwear review where I talk all about it and what it does. But it basically helps kind of reduce inflammation overnight. It's not a compression sleeve. It shouldn't be compared with that. But they have all different body part sleeves that you can wear for elbow, shoulders, hips, back, calves, socks, gloves, like pretty much any part of your body you can wrap in Incrediwear if you want to. And I'm a huge fan. That was something I knew right away to incorporate and put that on immediately. Secondly was icing. For me, obviously it was an inflammatory injury, there was inflammation in the fat pad. I knew I needed to ice that baby right away. So I went home, iced it, 20 minutes on, 20 minutes off, did the rotation of that and was really diligent with icing. And then the third thing I really did to focus on it was just, I knew right away that it really helped when I personally took an NSAID, so something that was a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory. So I took an Aleve, which is naproxen sodium, and that helped a lot, just kind of reduce the pain and the swelling in the knee. And within 2 to 3 days, it was back to normal. The rest of my muscles were able to recover. I was no longer compensating. The joint was able to, you know, relieve some of the pressure off of it since my muscles were working better. And all was said and done. So every time you go through a setback, like I said, you learn, you get data, you adapt, you grow, you change, and you become better at going through it. So it's a valuable process. I just wanted to share what I had gone through, my real-life example, and in hopes that it helps some of you guys go through the same thing. Because like I said, there will be setbacks. If you're an active person and you've had injuries, there will be setbacks. You just got to deal with them and find the system that works best for you. So I hope this helped, and if it did, go ahead and like this video, subscribe to my channel. I greatly appreciate everyone that has subscribed so far and continues to comment on these videos. It means so so, so, so much for me. Um, your support has been amazing as I've been growing this YouTube channel, so thank you, thank you, thank you so much. And until next time, bye!