Link to the video of the bilateral quad tendon rupture: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3Ksb1QOcGU/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Prior to the quad tendon rupture: “That day, I probably took the most lifts that I’ve ever taken, like leading up to a bigger lift. ⁓ I was just feeling good. I didn’t even have knee sleeves on. I was pain free that day, like not a single ounce of pain. I’m like, man, this is a good day. And then it wasn’t.”
The sound: “I literally thought that the wood from the platform broke underneath me I didn’t know it was my legs until I was on my back and I’m thinking I got hurt because the floor broke and I’m trying to move my leg and I literally couldn’t move my legs.”
Post surgery: “I had to keep my legs straight for like two weeks. I want to say I wasn’t allowed to bend in at all. So I had to sleep with a mobilizers on.”
“After two weeks I started physical therapy and it was mainly a lady just trying to get my range of motion back. So every day we’ll bend it just a little bit.”
“I was doing that physical therapy stuff for 16 or so weeks. And then I actually came back to America as soon as I felt like I was gonna be able to make it through an airport. Cause I was like, man, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to like walk through the airport. I don’t know if I can sit out on the plane. Cause there was like, there was a certain degree that I couldn’t bend my knee.”
Bending the knee: “It wasn’t like, it hurts. It was like, even if I try to force it, it’s stuck.”
Rehab: “I would hold onto a banister in the hallway and lower myself down as far as I could into a squat and stand up from there. And then start releasing the pressure a little bit every week, just until I got to the point that I do like a bodyweight squat onto a target by myself with no assistance. And I would just keep progressing from there. Just doing more and more and more.”
Pain in rehab: “Yes, the beginning only when I was doing the physical therapy because if it was up to me, I would have never gotten my range of motion back, bro. Like I kept thinking like this lady is going to snap it off again.”
Pain with rehab: “No, no, no, there was no pain. Actually, I would say I was in pain for so long that I didn’t realize that I was in pain before I got hurt, right? And so after the surgery, once I started like squatting again and jogging and stuff, I’m like, you know, I actually like, this actually doesn’t hurt. Like I’m doing stuff and it just feels fine.”
Later stage rehab: “I was just doing it myself, just researching as much as I could and just slowly progressing on basic exercises really.”
“I had to learn how to walk again. And then over time I started progressing on that, walking longer distances. I started jogging.”
“I kept the weighted exercises pretty basic. I’ve always been pretty basic with weights though… Like you need to squat, you need to pull, and you need to do the competition lift. So I’m not a big variety guy.”
Return to deadlifts: “That was super early because, yeah, I don’t really sit super deep on that deadlift anyways. So I think the first time I went back into the gym, I think I pulled like over four or five just because I didn’t have to use my legs like that much. And it didn’t feel like anything was going to happen to my legs because there was just like a a slight bend. I’m also a huge deadlifter too though so… I got the deadlift build.”
“I don’t know if I’m ever gonna want to do weightlifting competitively again, but I just said, I don’t want it to scare me for the rest of my life. So I said, I’m gonna start front squatting. I’m gonna start doing power cleans. Eventually when I stop being so scared I’m gonna try to catch the clean and ride it out.”
“You’re just not going to make it out of sports at a high level without something happening. Obviously you can manage the injuries and whatever, but yeah, being competitive is what put me there in the first place.”
The jerk: “Yeah, that’s the scariest thing to do.”
“Knowing the situation and how I got injured, I know more or less why it happened. So I’m not actually scared of it happening right now. I think if I was suffering from knee problems again, then I will be more scared of a re-rupture. But at the moment I’m not too scared about it.”
Learning to walk again: “Man, it’s weird because your brain knows how to do everything already, but it’s like my legs weren’t my legs. My body was scared to flex my knee. So I was walking stiff and I had started walking in physical therapy and she would tell me like, need to bend your knee. need to try to walk with a normal gait. And I’m like, I’m trying, bro. It’s just not that easy. So I was walking super stiff. I was kind of like waddling. I was basically, one of the things that helped me was I felt I would walk on a treadmill and kind of turn the speed up. It would force me to walk with a normal rhythm.”
Walking: “There’s a lot of buckling at first. There’s a lot of instability just from the surgery and not having walked for months. So I would take a step and it would literally feel like I was going to fall over. So that was scary.”
“I walked for I want to say months and one day I was like I’m running again. My legs are strong enough to be able to jog, I just need to start doing it.”
Jumping: “That’s the toughest thing and that’s still the toughest thing. I don’t know why jumping is scarier than lifting with the barbell. I don’t know why. It just feels like something’s gonna happen. I’m gonna miss the box or something like that. But at first, the hardest part was just landing. I couldn’t find a good way to land. It seemed like I should land with my knees bent, but that was scaring my body more than landing with my legs straight. But I was like, I don’t want to be jumping high and coming down with super straight legs, you know? So that was the weirdest thing for sure. It’s still kind of weird, but I was just in the gym. I couldn’t start jumping on boxes. So I would get a ⁓ 45 plate and I would jump onto that. And I would just try to like land softly and then I put another 45 plate on and I just kept doing that. And so it was roughly the height of the lowest box in the gym and I was like, all right, I think I can probably clear this box now. But you know, we do box jumps a lot and weight lifting so before I got hurt, I would jump all the time. And I was like the jumper guy in the gym. They’re like, that’s the guy that jumps on the high boxes. Now I’m scared to jump on 30 inch boxes and stuff, it’s crazy.”
“I’m a split jerker, but when I came back, I’ve been doing power jerks because I’m like, if it doesn’t feel good with just my body weight, I don’t want to be putting it under load… I recently did some split jerks and it didn’t hurt, but I’m still kind of cautious.”
“My knees never hurt when I started weight lifting. What I think happened was I switched to the reserves from active duty and like two weeks out of the year, I would have to go do army stuff and I couldn’t lift or whatever. And one of those times I came back after the two weeks and I kind of jumped straight back into training and I aggravated my knee. And ever since then, I’ve had problems with either one knee or the other one. And so I think I just jumped back into training too quickly and it would switch sides. I would baby this one, then I’ll go to this one. I’ll baby this one, and go to the other side. And that was like a four or five year thing leading up to the rupture.”
“Looking back at it, I would do some really stupid stuff. Like I’m just thinking about the last few years because I was competing so much. I would just take a bunch of Tylenol and I’ll put a bunch of menthol type cream on it… During competitions, I couldn’t feel my knees. So I would get the lifts done, but not a great idea.”
Most pain provoking: “It was the heavier cleans for sure… When I was dealing with some aggravation, if I came back, the things that didn’t hurt were snatches, very slow back squats.”
“The last two years before the rupture, I was basically exclusively pause squatting because I would just be like, man, doing regular squats, feels weird on that drop in. I need to just squat slower. And I was super strong, so I could still put up, you know, 550 pound squats even if I did a tempo down and pause at the bottom. So I’m like, there’s just no need for me to do the super bouncy squats.”
“The heavy cleans, I had less control of those. So it kind of smashed me into the bottom. I think those aggravated the most.”
“There are a lot of steroids in Olympic weightlifting, but I’m not a participant.”
“The only thing that was different in my life in that time, I had really taken up drinking wine. I was drinking wine like every night where I hadn’t really done that before. And I remember one time I was reading and someone was like, yeah, don’t drink alcohol after the surgery because it doesn’t help you. And I was like, I was drinking a lot of alcohol before that.”
“I think I ignored my pain for so long that it was inevitable. When it first happened, people asked me did I know what happened or I think I knew what happened and I really had no idea at the time. But looking back at it, like I said, probably from 2019 to 2024, I had a bunch of instances where my tendonitis, tendon, whatever you call it, had gotten so bad that I had to stop training with my coach. And when I would come back, wouldn’t do anything special. I would just go back to training because it didn’t hurt anymore. Then the other one would hurt and I would say, I need to take a couple of weeks off coach. Like my knee’s going crazy. And at some point, like I said, I just started slapping on the cream, rolling my SBD sleeves up and just training through it. And I think looking back at it, was kind of inevitable that some kind of event was going to happen. I definitely didn’t think that was going to happen or I wouldn’t have done it. But I kind of thought like, yeah, I’m just going to keep dealing with pain. I will address all of this when I’m done competing one day. That’s what I thought in my head.”
“I’ve always been super conservative with my, with my clients and my athletes though. ⁓ I’ve been a little bit more stupid with my own training because I’m like, it’s my own life, you know, but for other people, I’m like, Hey bro, like sports are not the end of y’all. Like you have a life, you have parents and stuff. You don’t want to destroy your body. Not be able to walk at 40, not be able to play with your kids and stuff. I’ve always told people that, but you know, for myself, it was just something that at the time I was ⁓ willing to sacrifice. So I don’t think it has changed my coaching that much because I’ve never told people to push through pain. If any of my athletes are hurt or something, I’m like, bro, it’s just one session. It’s one week. Like, let’s try to address this. It’s not going to change your whole life as an athlete if you take a couple weeks off or something and try to address this issue. But for me, I was like, nah bro, I’m not taking four weeks off and doing nothing.”
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