Hi Doctor,
I’m a 22 yo female soccer player, I had ACLR 1 year ago. I did a lot of strength training since then and gained back my strength in the main lifts and way beyond. I’m also back to playing soccer almost normally as long as I don’t play for too long.
During the rehabilitation I developed tendonitis in my quadriceps tendon. I can’t train as many days as I want to or play for a whole soccer game without feeling pain the next day, and being unable to go down the stairs. It’s an obstacle to my training sessions. I used to train everyday, now I train once a week. If I do more, I’m forced to rest for another week or two.
I thought that tracking my training time and increasing it gradually over time would help this issue, that my tendon will adapt to the stress. Is this a good point to start from?
Note also that I don’t have any pain when squatting.
Thank you so much for your time.
The slow increase over time is definitely more favorable than regressing the activity, as a hallmark of tendinopathy rehab is to slowly improve tolerance to activity and training, whether this is overall volume and/or intensity. During your more recent strength training, did you focus on single leg training in addition to the main lifts, i.e. leg extensions, lunges, step up/downs? Coming off ACLR we’d want to make sure that not only are you increasing overall strength, but looking at symmetry of quadriceps strength as well.
We have some resources that might help you as well. We recorded a podcast on tendinopathy (Stream episode Pain and Rehab Podcast Episode 7: Tendinopathy by Barbell Medicine podcast | Listen online for free on SoundCloud) and provide a knee rehabilitation programming template that addresses this specific presentation (https://www.barbellmedicine.com/shop/training-templates/16-week-knee-rehab-template/). If you don’t have any pain with squatting, then you’re a great candidate to utilize strength training to improve your current situation.