ACLR Guidelines: A Cookbook or an Essential Checklist
I know there's a lot of controversy in rehabilitation about using post-op protocols, and I get it. It's not supposed to be cookie cutter. It's not supposed to be cookbook type of thing, what we're doing. It should be based on the individual.
But here's why I really like rehab guidelines is when I'm in the clinic and busy, I'm patient after patient after patient, and I don't have time to sit and think about the biological healing, what point they are in their rehab process, and kind of do all that mental math and think about what can and can't be done. And I don't want to have to do that on the fly. So rehab guidelines give me that.
The other thing they give me is a checklist of things that I don't want to forget. I want to be sure I'm doing this type of testing right now, or this type of exercise, is now a really great time to start this, and it really helps me from forgetting things. It's not that I don't know that those are good activities or good tests to perform. It's just in the busyness of the day, I'll forget them.
The third thing that I really like about these rehab guidelines is they incorporate the Functional Movement System, and so that we're working on movement early rather than waiting until someone's getting to plyometrics. And now I'm having to fix their deep squat pattern. I'm having to coach valgus collapse. When I work on movement early, I don't have to coach any of that stuff. And the higher level functional activities become so much easier and so much more authentic. So I hope you enjoy them. You can download them here.