9 months post ACL surgery — advice for returning to Judo?
Hi guys. I’ve read several posts related to ACL recovery and I’ve also been talking with my sensei about it. Still, it gives me some peace of mind to hear from more people who have gone through this themselves or who have teammates/students in the same situation.
M29 90kg at the time of injury, 84kg right now. 1 year of Judo experience. I tore my ACL and meniscus in June. I trained for one more month before surgery in August (only newaza, some ukemi techniques, and uchikomi without turn throws). Under those conditions, my sensei adapted things so I could still take my yellow belt exam (I don’t feel like I fully deserved it, but he said it was more about the work I had put in throughout the year than the exam itself).
By the end of this month, I’ll officially be 9 months post-op and supposedly cleared to return to training. I can already jump, do deep squats, run, swings, and lunges with kettlebells. In about 10 days I should also get the results of an MRI to check the current state of my new ligament.
I talked with my sensei — he suffered the same injury himself — and also with several teammates. He told me we’re going to start slowly, with at least a month before returning to tachiwaza randori. But I should already be able to go back to uchikomi, nagekomi (with black belts), and unrestricted newaza.
Even with the injury, I kept going to watch classes. For a while, I was honestly scared about coming back, especially seeing so many situations in Randori where knees get tangled up. What advice would you give regarding techniques and safety when returning? I'm afriad of even receiving an ouchi gari on my bad leg**.** I liked using osoto gari, left-sided sasae, ippon seoi nage (althrough never landed it standing on randori), left-sided sode, kouchi makikomi, and harai makikomi (was already trying to move away from this last one).
If anyone is curious about how I got injured: I was doing a ken-ken osoto, uke was pushing me really hard with the arms, I ended up too far away, and I tried to close the distance with a hop before my reaping leg had actually hooked uke’s leg. My knee then collapsed inward with all my weight on it.
Thanks for reading.