At this point, progress seems fairly linear. Range of motion and strength continue to improve, with some distance yet to go. I’ve been able to walk up to 4 miles in a day, with only minor discomfort. Driving a manual transmission (operating the clutch with my recovering leg) has been going fine for a week now, and my gait is relatively even. Still not enough strength to lift my body on my repaired calf, though the two legged lifts are coming along nicely. I wonder a bit if I’ve suffered some permanent loss of function, but it’s possible that I’m just recovering more slowly than some others.
Sports-wise, I’m running in the pool, but not on land. I’ve started swimming to improve conditioning, while adding light lower-body work at the gym, including:
Rowing (light resistance)
Squats (no weight)
Lunges (no weight)
Deadlifts (light weight)
Kettlebell Swings (light weight)
Push presses (light weight)
4 Comments
Sounds good to me!
Ditto …sounds like you are making good progress. Think it’s FAR too early to be thinking loss of function. I am two weeks ahead of you and doing very similar exercises but can now also do a VERY small one legged lift, this has only just happened in the last week so just Keep positive!
I wondered the same when I couldn’t do a one-legged calls raise at about that point. I was barely doing one when I finished PT and went back to work. I can do it easily now; can’t even remember when that happened. I know it improved significantly when I started exaggerating the heel to toe movements on my walks to include a heel to up on my tippy toe with each stride of my op foot. Looked a little silly, I can’t say I did it when other people were around. Still, it produced results!
One surprising thing is the difference in strength required to do various “heel raises” that might seem pretty identical. Like:
- a straight-knee 1LHR;
- a bent-knee 1LHR;
- a perfectly normal fast-walking long stride, with a good pushoff;
- a “silly walk” (as you describe), where you rise up onto your toes at the end of each stride.
- Good performance in explosive athletics that SEEM to require AT-&-calf strength, like volleyball, basketball, other court sports, soccer, etc.
The bent-knee 1LHR (or rolling forward onto your toes with your knee bent) is probably a pretty pure Soleus test, so it would be easy for many ATR folks whose weakness is in the Gastroc.
For the others, I became capable of striding normally at high speed (and long stride length) first. I think the “silly walk” came second, though good sports performance came surprisingly early, too. On one side, I still can’t do a good straight-knee 1lHR, and presumably never will. It’s a good exercise and a clear strength test, though I don’t think the results of that test are very meaningful for the rest of your activities.
I could have added a good “2 up, 1 down” to the list — not sure exactly where it fits in. “2 up” — a 2LHR — is clearly easier than the others, but holding your weight up on one leg (even to drop down slowly) is much harder.
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