Doc Says No Lower Body For 2 Months

Training Powerlifting
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…Doc Says No Lower Body For 2 Months

Long story short, I ended up chasing some guy because my sister went missing and apparently I irritated the tendon that connects my quad to my knee. My doctor said it’s inflamed and it will take about 2 months to heal.

I do 5/3/1 which has 2 lower body days that focus on the squat and deadlift. I really want to avoid further injuring myself so im going to stay away from working my legs until its healed. However, I have no idea what to do on those lower body days.

Any advice would help me a lot, i think i’m going to focus on my upper/lower back grip but im not sure what else. I use dave tates method of assistance work.

2

I would use two bench days doing shoulders and triceps as well on those days and two back days, stregnthing your back should help with bench and with your lower body lifts when you come back, do lots of rows, pullup variations etc… also for grip just dont use straps.

3

What your doctor really means is no knee extension work for 2 months. See if these exercises bother it:

  1. Good Morning
  2. RDL
  3. hamstring curl
  4. reverse hyper

Good luck!

4

[quote]fedaykin wrote:
What your doctor really means is no knee extension work for 2 months. See if these exercises bother it:

  1. Good Morning
  2. RDL
  3. hamstring curl
  4. reverse hyper

Good luck![/quote]

I can’t get into position on deadlifts without a lot of pain, right now my knee tends to hurt just when I walk, its not extreme but getting into position for deadlifts and even some keen bend with good mornings would hurt a lot. I dont want to further injure myself.

Im trying to figure out what to put in 2 days. I wanted to still be able to work my hams/lower back but i think the only way i can do it without hurting myself is a seated good morning, possibly a sldl, and ghrs. Im kind of worried that this will develop an imbalance between my hams and quads however.

5

Train what is trainable. If you can’t do anything for lower body, then you can cut down to 2 days a week. Replacing your lower body days with 2 more upper body days will probably be counterproductive.

6

[quote]Gilynn wrote:
…Doc Says No Lower Body For 2 Months

Long story short, I ended up chasing some guy because my sister went missing and apparently I irritated the tendon that connects my quad to my knee. My doctor said it’s inflamed and it will take about 2 months to heal.

I do 5/3/1 which has 2 lower body days that focus on the squat and deadlift. I really want to avoid further injuring myself so im going to stay away from working my legs until its healed. However, I have no idea what to do on those lower body days.

Any advice would help me a lot, i think i’m going to focus on my upper/lower back grip but im not sure what else. I use dave tates method of assistance work.[/quote]

wait what? did anyone else catch that his “sister went missing”? if that is what i think it means…she was kipnapped, bond, held for ransom and perhaps other explicit things done to her and the OP is worried about working his lower body?

shit

7

^^
Well my mom had convinced me my sister went missing, she calls every night at 9 after she feeds the stray cats at our school and says goodnight to my little sister. My mom told me she never called and couldnt get a hold of her so I went to check the spot she feeds the cats in.

When I got there none of their bowls had food in them so it was obvious my sister hadn’t been there since yesterday. I thought I saw the guy who works with her (who i think is a creep) so i yelled out his name and he just looked back and picked up his pace.

I started chasing after him and…turns out it wasn’t the guy…

As for my sister…she left her phone in her car and was at a friends house she met that night so nobody had her number…

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Yeah, I wasn’t even touching that unless it was brought up by someone else. Good luck man. I hope you get better soon. Can I ask how running caused your patellar tendon to become so ridiculously inflamed? Do you ever run? Did you do something abnormally ridiculous while running?

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[quote]fedaykin wrote:
Yeah, I wasn’t even touching that unless it was brought up by someone else. Good luck man. I hope you get better soon. Can I ask how running caused your patellar tendon to become so ridiculously inflamed? Do you ever run? Did you do something abnormally ridiculous while running?[/quote]

I cant remember the last time I sprinted like that, I never do much cardio considering im a skinny 165 lb 5 ft 10 19 year old looking to gain weight, im not 100% sure that was the cause of the injury and it could have been doing rack pulls to heavy or something.

But I know after that my knee was painful enough to where i figured a doctors visit was appropriate

10

As another poster brought up, what did you do to specifically hurt your tendon? Any knee torque/buckling or just straight out sprinting? Is the pain above or below your patella/knee cap? Have you ever injured this knee before? What kind of doctor did you see, general practice, ortho, chiro, etc? Did you get referred for PT? Given any meds? Just told to rest? Any image testing done or just a physical evaluation by the doctor? There is a lot of missing information if you want outside opinions on how to handle the situation.

From what I’ve gathered from your posts, you only injured one knee. If you absolutely can’t get into any position that requires a knee bend, then I would say stick to single leg work until symptoms resolve. But don’t just neglect your “injured leg”. Can’t give much advice regarding the injured leg without first getting the above questions answered.

-LH

11

I just had the exact same injury. I hurt the same tendon still did squats the next day. Then I took a week off knee extension motions and went back to light(sorta) leg work. It still hurts but only on the warm ups. I doubt It’ll take a full 2 months their just being cautious. They told mee the same thing when i strianed my rhomboid over the sumer and I was out 3 weeks. Give it a week or so to heal and if it stars to feel better i found that a vertical leg press with toes off is a good way to get back to quad training. whatever you do no leg extensions even light and even after it stops hurting…trust me.

My advice for now
Leg curls
GHRs
Weighted hypers
reverse hypers
hip abduction/adduction
calves

Now could be a good time to really build up your posterior chain and calves

12

Maybe walking in a pool or bodyweight squats or soemthing similiar will help speed recovery. Don’t aggravate it or you will end up missing more time.

13

[quote]LevelHeaded wrote:
As another poster brought up, what did you do to specifically hurt your tendon? Any knee torque/buckling or just straight out sprinting? Is the pain above or below your patella/knee cap? Have you ever injured this knee before? What kind of doctor did you see, general practice, ortho, chiro, etc? Did you get referred for PT? Given any meds? Just told to rest? Any image testing done or just a physical evaluation by the doctor? There is a lot of missing information if you want outside opinions on how to handle the situation.

From what I’ve gathered from your posts, you only injured one knee. If you absolutely can’t get into any position that requires a knee bend, then I would say stick to single leg work until symptoms resolve. But don’t just neglect your “injured leg”. Can’t give much advice regarding the injured leg without first getting the above questions answered.

-LH

[/quote]

I wish i could be more specific but my dad is a surgeon and his friends helped me out so they treated me less formally than your average patient. The ortho i went to told me I needed an MRI to see if anything was wrong and when i got the MRI the radiologist looked at it and said I pulled my muscle. My dad told me the most specific answer saying the MRI showed an area that showed fluid from inflammation and that my tendon was irritated. There was no advice on what to do besides no knee extension exercises and no medication either.

The pain seems to be at the inner top right of my left knee cap.

14

[quote]Gilynn wrote:

[quote]LevelHeaded wrote:
As another poster brought up, what did you do to specifically hurt your tendon? Any knee torque/buckling or just straight out sprinting? Is the pain above or below your patella/knee cap? Have you ever injured this knee before? What kind of doctor did you see, general practice, ortho, chiro, etc? Did you get referred for PT? Given any meds? Just told to rest? Any image testing done or just a physical evaluation by the doctor? There is a lot of missing information if you want outside opinions on how to handle the situation.

From what I’ve gathered from your posts, you only injured one knee. If you absolutely can’t get into any position that requires a knee bend, then I would say stick to single leg work until symptoms resolve. But don’t just neglect your “injured leg”. Can’t give much advice regarding the injured leg without first getting the above questions answered.

-LH

[/quote]

I wish i could be more specific but my dad is a surgeon and his friends helped me out so they treated me less formally than your average patient. The ortho i went to told me I needed an MRI to see if anything was wrong and when i got the MRI the radiologist looked at it and said I pulled my muscle. My dad told me the most specific answer saying the MRI showed an area that showed fluid from inflammation and that my tendon was irritated. There was no advice on what to do besides no knee extension exercises and no medication either.

The pain seems to be at the inner top right of my left knee cap.[/quote]

Well the good thing is that you saw an actual Ortho and did get the MRI since they felt it was needed. Sounds from the MRI results description that you have inflammation to your quad tendon and from the location of pain, you may have some damage to your VMO or surrounding fascial tissue. Again this is going solely off of what you have described. Good news is that none of it sounds very serious at all. Just may take time to recover, and it is hard to give an exact timeline since each person recovers at a different rate. 2 months does seem like a long recovery expectation though.

In regards to medication - I am not a big advocate of automatically tossing down pills to decrease pain, especially over the long term. But in the short run, I feel that anti-inflammatories can help control the inflammatory response, get you moving sooner, and in turn help with recovery quicker as well. As long as you have no history of stomach troubles or ulcers, I generally always say to go with the lowest strength of prescription anti-inflammatory (600-800mg IBU 3 x day would suite your body size well), but I would just ask your doctor what he/she recommends.

In the mean time, until you feel you can use the injured leg, you still have one completely healthy leg. Do a lot of single leg work to keep that leg active. Find what exercises you can do with the injured leg that doesn’t cause pain and perform those. WIth the injured leg, I would recommend some ROM work for your hip flexors and knee extensors. Keep it light, you don’t have to crank down hard on the stretch or force into deep ROM during dynamic mobility drills. Some light friction massage will probably help over the area too, along with ice or ice cup massages.

Main thing is to keep active. Work what you can as you normally would train, alter what you can’t perform and keep moving towards full recovery. Best of luck!