I just started my journey a couple of weeks ago with an empty bar, this is 40kg clean @67kg body weight I notice for now that I receive the bar heavily on my racking position. Any comments on the technique and any resources to improve it?
I don't know if it is going to help anyone or not, but I wrote this to myself about the journey I have been through.
I don’t know why I keep thinking about the rehab I did last year. Maybe because I have some rehab left to do after thinking I was done. Things keep coming back to me to let me know I am not done processing the weight of it, so this piece is to process what is left, in the hope that it could help someone along the way.
The times I cried last year, which I cannot even count, still hit me every now and then when I see someone going through it. How many times did I cry after training, in defeat, looking at my weakness? The heaviness I carried thinking about the future, and the questions that kept coming to me without a real answer: “Will I be in pain my whole life?” “Will I be back to how I was?” No matter what I read about people healing fine, it just didn’t feel like a near future to me, so I couldn’t believe it back then. Let alone the fear of re-tearing that kept haunting me and still doesn’t fully fade away until you no longer think that much about your knee.
The process of rehab, from the moment of the injury, was intertwined with grief. The moment I injured myself, a feeling of doom filled my heart, limping to the car and to the ER and refusing assistance from anyone. Two days later I went to my sports medicine doctor for him to deliver the news. I was confused; I didn’t fully understand what an ACL was, or why we were talking about surgery if I wanted to be back to tennis.
I would say this is where the grieving process started, and it kept going for a long time. I prayed that the doctor was wrong, that my knee was okay, and for a full week I went back and forth between denial, regretting how the injury happened, replaying everything hoping it had gone differently, and thinking about what was next, until I did the MRI. I remember the exact moment I opened the report and read it. It was in the morning, I had just woken up, and my eyes skimmed fast through the report, but my mind couldn’t process what was written no matter how many times I read it. So I booked an appointment with my doctor, hoping for help and support. I still remember that appointment quite well, and one thing he said stayed with me for a long time: “It is a long rehab, but you will see the light at the end of the tunnel.” I remember asking him when I could play tennis, hoping to put a timeline on it to keep myself motivated for what was next. But I remember losing hope and finding it again, over and over, during the first stage of the rehab. I wonder now, was it hope or faith? Because at some point I didn’t want to go back to any pivoting sport, so as not to go through this pain again, and I genuinely thought I couldn’t.
I tried to chase rehab from the first moment after I left his office, but the physios I saw just asked me to rest and not do anything until the surgery. As much as I knew I had to do something, as much as I wanted to prepare my knee for surgery, I couldn’t know what to do because of the complexity of the injury and my lack of knowledge. For those weeks before my surgery, I felt my life had been put on pause.
The day of the surgery, as I was heading to the OR, I remember shivering non-stop, probably from the cold or from fear, as they explained what could happen and what the surgery would involve. My anesthesiologist was there to calm me down. I realized there that I could not tolerate hearing them discussing anything during the surgery, or the idea of hearing them drilling through my bone, so I asked my doctor to put me to sleep.
On the hospital bed, I remember feeling blessed that one of the menisci had healed on its own instead of needing the root repair they initially thought it would. I left the hospital the next day and went to physiotherapy the same afternoon. Still not fully recovered from the surgery and the anesthesia, I promised myself back then that I would commit to this journey fully. There I did quad sets and asked my physio the question that accompanied me throughout the journey: “This is painful, is it okay to continue?” The pain was extreme, and I was asking if I could push through it, ready to give it all I had, ignore the pain, and grind.
I wanted to do everything right. Since I blamed myself completely for my injury, I wanted to do everything right to redeem the mistake I didn’t forgive myself for, for a long time. I read about the rehab; I found and read textbooks that were not meant for me or for non-specialized people, because what do you mean I cannot put more than x newtons of shear force on the graft at 60 degrees? I knew force and newtons in a physics context, but how can that even be measured here? All I knew back then was that I had to put 50% of my weight on the injured leg and keep using two crutches until the 6-week mark, but I kept questioning myself, whether I was doing enough or doing too much, and carried the weight of managing my rehab instead of leaving it to my physiotherapist.
When did it hit me, how weak I was, the loss of my autonomy? Was it when I looked at my leg after surgery and realized all the muscle was just gone, and it was significantly smaller than the other leg? When I was walking with crutches, barely holding my own weight? I remember the realization fully hit me when my family left the house and left me alone for an hour or so. All I wanted was to sit with a cup of coffee near the window, but the challenge was how to hold the cup when I had to walk with two crutches. I put the cup on a small coffee table and kept dragging it along. A one-minute task took me around 10 minutes of moving the table. I remember stopping in the middle, tired, and that’s when I burst fully into tears, in defeat at a simple task. I couldn’t wait for those weeks to end so I could walk without crutches.
I was back at my university before I could walk again, joyful that my life was back, even if only partially. I was roaming around with crutches until my palms and shoulders ached constantly from holding my weight for 6 weeks. I remember the first steps I took without the crutches; I was surprised by how heavy my weight was on that leg, as if I were carrying a 100kg rock. After a couple of steps toward the bus station my leg was shivering, and then I was limping around, since the muscles on that leg were still so weak. Here we start my second round of rehab, which went on for months non-stop. Every physiotherapy appointment took around 6-7 hours: commuting, waiting, then commuting back. I remember always thinking about what to have for dinner, and how I would manage with all this time spent on one appointment. To make my life easier, I fought with my previous coach to train me and check my form on the physio exercises, just to commute less for those appointments. I understood back then the responsibility of rehabbing an injured client, so I went back to training alone, hoping I wouldn’t overdo it or hurt myself. But when exactly did it occur to me to look for a trainer who could work with injured people? I just remembered the discussion with my doctor, who recommended a trainer he trusted with these injuries. I still think to this day how blessed I am to have trained with this new coach at the most critical time of this injury. I remember when I talked to him, I wanted to start training with him when I began plyometrics, around 4-5 months post-op, but he suggested starting after his vacation, which would be 3 months post-op for me. I remember him explaining a couple of things about the injury and me nodding, half focused, just wanting to sit because my knee was hurting.
When I came for the first session with him, he was assessing where I was at to know where to start with me, and I remember him saying “you’re progressive” and me denying it internally, thinking about all the things I couldn’t do yet. What I knew back then was that the weight of the rehab, and of commuting back and forth, lifted from my heart as I gained my strength training with him. Yet my weakness and pain kept hitting me from time to time. I remember one session where the pain was limiting every exercise I was doing, even ones that had been doable a week before. We went from one modification to the next and I kept training as much as I could, but on the bus on my way back home I remember crying the whole way until I reached home. At times, I couldn’t feel anything but defeat. Around that time, I also started introducing running again. As much as I was flying in the physiotherapy center doing A-skips for the first time in a while, for the next two months running was torture for how much pain it caused me, and I thought I would never run without pain. I remember in August I had a dream that I was running pain-free, and I remember waking up and getting ready to go to the gym before asking my coach if I could try to run. To my surprise, I was no longer limping while running or in excruciating pain. I still have this date written on my board as my first pain-free run.
I held myself to standards that I now think were too high and rigid, but I understand where they came from. I still held myself accountable for injuring myself, so I wanted to hold the responsibility for committing to my rehab. But maybe I overcommitted? I remember the time I woke up with a fever, feeling unwell. As I barely left my bed to reach for my phone and contact my coach to cancel the session, I kept staring at my phone with turmoil inside me. I couldn’t let myself cancel the session and went to train anyway. At that time, I couldn’t let myself rest even for a day, feeling as if I would be failing myself, so I kept going without allowing myself to stop, because the rule was to never skip a day, huh?
Here we are, doing my first isokinetic test, where the surgical side was 21% weaker. I didn’t take the results well, and in the disappointment that filled my heart, despite everyone saying I was on the right track, I pushed myself more and more relentlessly. Looking back at it now, I am grateful to my coach for slowing me down when I couldn’t think beyond this injury and the number, when I was pushing myself in the gym until my legs collapsed under me from fatigue, no matter whether I could push the full stack on the leg press machine or not. I wanted to close that difference no matter what it took. I remember going to the other gym in the facility after training with my coach so I could push more, when I clearly shouldn’t have, but waiting and doing nothing was more painful to me than the pain I felt in my knee.
After grinding for 2 months, I did the isokinetic test again and found we had closed the asymmetry to a reasonable number. I texted my coach in pure joy: “We defeated that machine.” I remember feeling more like myself, lighter and more joyful. I remember the doubts I had about my explosive power, my sprinting speed, my confidence when I played again; those came back with time, and kept coming back, even when I sometimes lost hope that they would ever be what they were. But when did it get better? With time, I think — when my body started telling me it was healing, and I could finally listen.
Now that I am in a better headspace, I keep thinking: what made me go as hard as I went, when I could have let my body lead the way and heal at its own pace? Why did I burn myself out in the process, and reach a point where I was crying on my way to rehab or the gym, wishing I could just rest?
I was carrying the weight of this injury and rehab and never made it easy on myself. I didn’t recognize how much I was blaming myself for everything, how much I was grieving the loss of my health, after I had only just gotten my life back pain-free following an accident I had in 2022, after almost a year and a half of chronic pain. For this I blamed myself for the full year of rehab, a year that looks so narrow outside the rehab, holding myself fully responsible and wanting to do everything right. I carried the weight of the rehab, the grief, and the self-blame, wishing it hadn’t happened, and between this and doubting what things would look like at the end of the tunnel, I saw the light after wondering whether it was there at all. It took me a while to forgive myself, knowing everyone makes mistakes; some cost people their lives, some people get out lucky enough not to be hurt, and there is a lot in between. It just proves we are human, and we can learn from those experiences no matter what they hold for us. the injury was never a mistake to be redeemed, but a mistake, a mistake to be forgiven.
As I discover that there is more work to be done, and my instinct pushes me to grind again, I remind myself to give myself the time to heal. This injury sucks, and the mental toll of it is real. But the light was actually at the end of the tunnel, and so was the life I thought I had lost. Our bodies heal, and our souls adapt to be stronger. I still consider myself lucky. I was able to afford rehab when a lot of people cannot even see a physio. I am lucky I could train with someone who hit the brakes for me so I wouldn’t overdo it, while I slowly learned to listen to and respect my body. I learned not to take anything for granted, which makes me aware of the blessings that feel like a given, simple things like going to the gym, being able to lift my leg and bend my knee, to walk and run, when those were impossible for a while.
Hello everyone,
I am coming to Warsaw soon and I would like to ask any recommendations for taking a tennis session with an English-speaking coach?
Somewhere around Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) Politechnika Warszawska would be great!
Thanks