Hello, my name is Ryan Solberg. I’m a physical therapist and Director of Therapy Services here at Tahoe Forest Hospital, and I’m here to talk to you about ACL injury prevention.
Injuries occur mostly with deceleration and the knee rotating with an inward stress. We’re going into winter season, we’re in Tahoe, and it affects all the winter season athletes. We’re going to jump into the top five exercises that will help prevent an ACL injury going into this winter season.
We want to start initially with a double leg position, meaning both legs are on the ground, doing a good functional squat, hinging through the hips, proper motion through the ankle, knees, and hips, with our back straight. Then we progress into single leg, keeping that same form and function, and then we could add different layers where we add weight, a kettlebell in front of us holding on, or we could have dumbbells beside us. From there, then we can build plyometrics. We can then progress into jumping off of the single leg and really focus on landing mechanics, making sure that the knee does not twist inward.
Next exercise, lunge progression. So lunge progression, we advance that leg forward, and we want to build the foundational strength on how you land with that foot in front of you. And then again, we add different layers with resistance.
So let’s jump into quadricep strengthening. Here we have a Thera-Band attached to the ankle, and you’re going to simply extend your knee out, tightening your quad muscle, focusing on really developing full extension and good quadricep tone.
Next exercise, we go into a simple isolated hamstring strengthening exercise. We’ll attach the Thera-Band around the ankle, simply pull it back with good resistance, but focus mostly on the eccentric part of the exercise, meaning the lengthening phase.
We know that we want to activate core, so we’re going to just go right into side plank progressions. Easy enough to do is doing a side plank off of your elbow and your knee, progressing to where you can actually extend with your legs in full extension, and then you can add different layers to that, meaning that you can do a top leg lift, you can do a bottom leg lift, while maintaining a nice firm plank position.
Thank you for joining us. You can find us on the website, and you can also look up our retail-based classes that we offer for the community at all of our clinics: Tahoe City, Incline Village, Truckee, along with our advanced rehab that we do in the clinic.
