Sport happens fast and it happens unpredictably.
I’ve mentioned Dr. Schmidtbleicher before here, and today we wanted to test out part of their return to play protocol post-ACL surgery.
According to Schmidtbleicher, the final part of their protocol is to have athletes run, jump over a hurdle, and land on either their left or right leg, depending on which their coach signals for. This is some serious stress, especially when compared to what we normally see in the US for return to play protocol.
However, what this is going to allow us to do is ensure we FULLY challenge the athlete before we put them back into the chaotic world of sport.
Advancing this concept further, it only makes sense to introduce this stress even BEFORE the athlete gets injured, for the same reason: we want to make sure they can tolerate and properly handle this stress BEFORE they get in a game and have a higher risk for injury.
This concept is something that can be extrapolated out even further than ACL. In the video, you can see us testing out the upper body as well, using the same protocol. But we can target the elbow, the ankle, the hip, etc – pretty well any area we want, with a little creativity. Looking forward to building out and utilizing a full protocol with this process in mind.