Summer sports are running at full speed, and with them come potentially career-changing injuries. A tear or sprain of the anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, is one of the more common knee injuries in high-demand sports, such as football and soccer.
Keith Corpus, MD, an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon with OSF HealthCare and Great Plains Orthopaedics, noted while the outpatient visit to fix your ACL may only take a day, the recovery time is much longer.
“It’s at least a nine-month recovery process to get back to full sports,” Dr. Corpus said. “There’s protocol we progress through, including getting motion back and strengthening your back. Then we have to get you back running, which is normally around the four- or five-month time point.”
After this, patients use crutches and wear a brace to protect the knee. Progressing into higher-level athletics at the six-month time point, the patient transitions typically to a smaller brace they can wear while playing. Full return to sports, at the earliest, is around nine months.
ACL injuries normally happen in sports with sharp changes in direction.
“It’s really common in cutting and pivoting sports,” Dr. Corpus reported. “You’ll put your foot on the ground, then turn, and your ACL can tear. It can obviously cause pain, but it also can cause prolonged instability and other damage to your knee.”
In the young athletic population, the ACL almost always has to be fixed.
“There are certain populations, as we age, when we don’t fix the ACL. But in our younger athletes playing contact sports, we fix them to try and prevent things from happening down the line, if your knee becomes increasingly unstable,” Dr. Corpus remarked. “It’s certainly surgery – we basically try to make you a new ACL.”
While the circumstances of an ACL tear often are not avoidable, there are some proactive steps you can take to protect your knee as a whole.
According to Dr. Corpus, “Having proper mechanics when you’re cutting, pivoting, or landing are important. There are strategies we can try. If you’re transitioning from one sport to another, or if you’ve been inactive for the winter and now you’re ramping up for other activities, make sure you’re doing so in a slow and deliberate manner.”