Everybody who reads this magazine is involved with strength athletics in some way. If you’re an athlete or coach, you understand there’s a risk of injury to what you do. Nobody should be under any illusions if they compete in a sport that involves a lot of power, impact, and extreme stress on the body. You can get hurt doing this stuff. If you do it correctly, there’s a much better chance you’ll be okay. But even still, there’s always a possibility that you might get banged up.

Knee injuries are big ones. ACL injuries, specifically, can really do a wallop on your career. I don’t want to assume too much, so I guess I should give you a brief explanation of what the ACL is. If you already know all of this, just bear with me for a minute. “ACL” is a common abbreviation for the anterior cruciate ligament, which is one of the main things that holds your knee together. It’s a ligament that connects your thighbone (femur) to your shinbone (tibia), and it’s pretty important for the stability of the joint. If you damage your ACL, it’s bad news. Your ability to do a lot of physical skills will be hampered if this little sucker isn’t intact. ACLs can tear, most commonly in activities that involve a lot of pivots, lateral cuts, twisting, etc. Soccer and football are huge danger zones for the ACL. Once you’ve torn this ligament, your knee isn’t totally stable anymore. Most sports people see ACL injuries as the “big kahuna” of knee problems. There’s kind of a dark cloud of doom that seems to hang over conversations when you’re talking about it.

If you tear your ACL and you decide to get it surgically repaired, it’s a pretty gnarly experience. The recovery time from ACL reconstruction is around nine to 12 months. Most people can walk without crutches within a couple of weeks after the operation, but then there’s a lot of physical therapy and rehab you have to go through, and it’s not pleasant. It’s a very long road back. The knee actually takes several weeks just to be completely healed, and then there’s a ton of work required to get rid of the swelling and regain range of motion.

I decided to write about this because a lot of people ask me about it. You see, I’m in the middle of an extended recovery process of ACL surgeries. I’ve torn both of them, right and left knees. I got ACL reconstruction surgery on my right knee in June 2011. It had been torn for a long time before I finally decided to get it fixed. My surgeon did the job, and then I started the arduous rehab process. While I was spending months getting it back to 100%, I decided to have my doctor examine my left knee as well, because I’d been having trouble with it for a long time and I wanted to find out exactly what was wrong. After getting an MRI, I found out that my left ACL was completely torn also. So right now, I’ve been training and competing for over a year with a torn ACL in my left knee and a reconstructed one in the right. I’m going in for surgery to get the left one fixed next month. I’ll have another year of rehab after that, and then I’ll be 42 years old with two reconstructed ACLs. I plan to continue competitive weightlifting when this is all done.

The learning experience of this whole journey has been incredible. My entire thinking about surgeries, recovery, how the body works, and mental strength is different from what it used to be. I’m not the same person I was before I started this.

Most of you work with adult athletes, and we know ACL injuries are unfortunately common. That means there’s a pretty high chance you’ll work with somebody, at some point, who has an ACL tear or is coming back from surgery. So because you’ll probably need to know something about ACL injuries and weightlifting at some point in your career as a lifter or coach, read on.

Background and how I got hurt…
Let me start by giving you the basic story of how these boo-boos occurred:

Left knee:
- I partially dislocated my knee during a freak accident with a 187.5 kg clean and jerk in 1999. I got an MRI after this injury and the doctor told me my ACL was “stretched.” I didn’t get any kind of surgery to repair it.
- In the years since that, I had various little tweaks to the knee. None of them felt like big blow-outs, but I could tell they were re-aggravations of the 1999 injury. All of these incidents were in non-lifting related activities.
- In 2012, I got another MRI on the knee and the doctor told me my ACL was now completely torn. So it went from a “stretch” to a “complete tear” over the course of thirteen years of training, additional minor injuries, etc.

Right Knee:
- In 2005, I had a major wipeout doing Scottish Highland Games throwing. It’s hard to describe exactly how it happened, but I felt a big pop in my knee and I knew something was seriously wrong. I didn’t get it looked at by a doctor, just waited for it to feel better and then I started training again. It felt fine after a while.
- In 2010, I hit an awkward position during a 150 kg clean and jerk, and my knee dislocated. After describing the whole situation with my surgeon, he believed I partially tore it in 2005 during the throwing incident, and the 2010 accident was the final straw that upgraded it to a complete tear.

What I could/couldn’t do while they were torn…

This is where I had a lot of surprises. You see, I was always under the impression that an ACL tear (even a partial one) basically prohibited you from being able to do any kind of real physical activity. All I’ve known about these types of injuries are what I read in my sports physiology classes in college and what I’ve heard from talking to athletes and coaches over the years. My understanding was that a torn ACL left your knee like a wobbly two-piece popsicle stick that could fold up right underneath you while you were walking down the street.

It isn’t like that. Here is a list of things I was able to do/not do at different points during the years when my ACLs were damaged:

- From 2006-2010, I was still competing successfully in weightlifting. I snatched over 300 lbs multiple times during this phase, clean and jerking around 360-370 lbs.
- I was routinely back squatting around 500 lbs.
- I actually went to a powerlifting meet in February 2011, when both ACLs were completely torn, and did a 600 lb deadlift.
- Since getting the right ACL fixed in 2011, I’ve made it back to a 280 lb snatch and a 324 lb clean and jerk (power clean and push jerk). This is with the left ACL still completely torn.
- Lifts that don’t bother my knee at all: snatch, clean, squat, deadlift, push jerk
- Lifts I can’t do: split jerks (I could feel my knee joint wobbling and slipping out of place if I tried to jerk anything heavier than 300 lbs, all of my jerks since 2000 have been push jerks)

There really wasn’t any knee pain during these times. When I told people about my problems, they all seemed to have the idea that I was constantly hurting. “Torn ACL” sounds pretty bad, and there was a general conception that serious agony was guaranteed when I lifted weights. This wasn’t the case. Even now, with my left ACL 100% torn, I don’t feel much pain when I lift. I also don’t feel any instability, as long as I confine myself to the lifts I mentioned above. If I were to try to split jerk, play basketball, do any kind of one-legged jumping, etc., I would probably have serious problems. But I don’t do any of that, so everything feels surprisingly good.

But keep a couple of things in mind. A) If your muscles (especially your hamstrings) are strong, there’s a much better chance of your knee staying stable when you lift with an ACL tear. B) I’ve been able to lift pretty well with the tear, but I’m also doing all of this lifting in my late 30s. I only train twice a week and I hold myself back from a lot of things. The caution I use is probably a big reason why I’ve been able to lift effectively with the damage. In other words, don’t think I’m saying that a torn ACL isn’t a major restricting factor with weightlifting training. It is. And when you’re doing the OLifts with a torn ACL, there’s obviously a much higher chance of damaging something else. I’ve gotten away with it because I’ve been cautious, plain and simple.

Preconceptions about surgery, what I learned…

I thought the surgery was going to wreck me. Before I actually spoke with my surgeon and a physical therapist about what I could expect, I thought I was going to be on crutches (or maybe a wheelchair) for several weeks. I also thought my knee would always have something wrong with it after the procedure. I guess I just had the uninformed thinking of an average person when I looked at it…that getting knee surgery was a bad thing and my body would be screwed afterwards. It seems like people have this fear when they hear the phrase “knee surgery” that the operation itself will cause permanent problems. I did, and that’s why I waited so long to seriously consider it.

It was totally different from how I imagined it. Yeah, there was some pain after I came out of it, but it wasn’t like I was lying in bed screaming or anything. Also, I was walking without crutches in five days. I had to take it very slow and careful, but I was still able to go on my own within the first week. The physical therapy was challenging, but I loved it. It felt great to see improvements every time I went to therapy, actually feeling the joint get stronger and more mobile from day to day. When it was time to return to lifting, here is what the doctors told me I could expect:
- Six weeks post-surgery: box squats above parallel
- 10-12 weeks post-surgery: parallel squats without a box
- 16 weeks post-surgery: Olympic lifts (power snatch and power clean only, starting with extremely light weights and making small increases every week), gradually working to lower depth on the squats

This is how they told me it would go, and they were right on the money. At 16 weeks, I was able to back squat 315x3 to slightly below parallel, and I started power snatching and power cleaning with 50-70 kilos. Seven months after the surgery, I was snatching around 250 lbs and back squatting 405 for triples without any pain or problems.

My knee hasn’t felt this good since I was 24, so one of the main things I learned from the experience is that there’s a reason why you get the surgery…because you’ll be better after you get it.

The bottom line…

“Torn ACL” has an end-of-the-road connotation to it. When somebody says they’ve got one, we react like they just told us they have cancer. And it’s understandable why this happens, because it’s a very severe injury and the surgery requires a long recovery. If you’re an athlete in
the prime of your career, you don’t think you have seven or eight months to spare. Hell, you don’t think you can take seven or eight days off. The prospect of losing almost a year and then having to come back from ground zero causes a lot of people to say, “I’m screwed.”

Well, you’re not totally screwed if you tear your ACL. That’s the main point I’m trying to make. First of all, you absolutely can come back from the injury and eventually be 100 percent again. You’ll have to go through a lot to get there, but it can be done. Second, you’ll be in better shape after you get it fixed. Surgeries aren’t the same as they were 30 years ago. Back in the old days, these procedures were a lot more invasive and traumatic. The scars were bigger, the cutting was larger, and the chances (and quality) of recovery might not have been as optimistic as they are now. But just like technology, things have become much more efficient and streamlined. Doctors can repair ACLs much easier than they used to, and the prognosis is considerably more hopeful.

I pray this never happens to you. Don’t get me wrong, it freaking sucks to deal with this injury. And most people never have to deal with it. Most likely, you’ll go through your whole career without anything like this. But if the worst does happen, or if you coach somebody who has to go through this, it helps to know that it’s not a death sentence. Even though it’s a nasty little piece of bad luck, the sun will come out tomorrow. Trust me, I know from experience.